What is the best practice for testing recipes, ations, etc. Is it possible to do something with unit tests? I'm new to all of this, as I'm sure you've guessed.

There are no a best practice for testing a whole recipe. Nevertheless you can do different tests for each part of the recipe. I mean, a test for each valueprovider, typeconverter, action and so on.

Also in the Web Service Software Factory we did the Recipe Runner that is a first approach to do tests for certain recipes. This is the WSSF community: http://www.codeplex.com/servicefactory and here http://www.codeplex.com/servicefactory/Wiki/View.aspx?title=GaxRecipeRunner&referringTitle=Home
you'll find the Recipe Runner and a small explanation of how you can do the tests.

hope it helps

There are no a best practice for testing a whole recipe. Nevertheless you can do different tests for each part of the recipe. I mean, a test for each valueprovider, typeconverter, action and so on.

Also in the Web Service Software Factory we did the Recipe Runner that is a first approach to do tests for certain recipes. This is the WSSF community: http://www.codeplex.com/servicefactory and here http://www.codeplex.com/servicefactory/Wiki/View.aspx?title=GaxRecipeRunner&referringTitle=Home
you'll find the Recipe Runner and a small explanation of how you can do the tests.

hope it helps

Thanks Jose, thats great information. I agree that you have to break down testing to the smallest level and build from there. Following on from that, what is the best method for testing/debugging a T4 template? I'm basically trying to create an comprehensive set of tools for doing this sort of development.

I'm going to show my ignorance here, but is there anyway to Mock the project that the recipe is being tested on. Is that even feasible? I came across Microsoft.VSSDK.UnitTestLibrary that provides some Mocking facilities and a OleServiceProvider. Is this possible? I think that I would prefer to do something like that in some cases, rather than have an actual project zipped up as seems to be the case with the RecipeRunner.

Thanks
Darren

Take a look to the WSSF because there you'll find how we've implemented different mock to do the test. Also there you'll find in WCF Package Tests/Actions, some fixtures to test T4 templates.