He tasks me; he heaps me.... I will wreak that MOQ upon him.

Enough with the horrific misquotes - this is about Moq and async (that's my slight justification for robbing Herman Melville).

It's pretty straightforward to use Moq to do async testing thanks to it's marvellous ReturnsAsync method. That means it's really easy to test a class that consumes an async API. Below is an example of a class that does just that: (it so happens that this class is a Web API controller but that's pretty irrelevant to be honest)

namespace Proverb.Web.Controllers
{
    // ISageService included inline for ease of explanation
    public interface ISageService
    {
        Task<int> DeleteAsync(int id);
    }

    public class SageController : ApiController
    {
        ISageService _sageService;

        public SageController(ISageService userService)
        {
            _sageService = userService;
        }

        public async Task<IHttpActionResult> Delete(int id)
        {
            int deleteCount = await _sageService.DeleteAsync(id);

            if (deleteCount == 0)
                return NotFound();
            else
                return Ok();
        }
   }
}

To mock the _sageService.DeleteAsync method it's as easy as this:

namespace Proverb.Web.Tests.ASPNet.Controllers
{
    [TestClass]
    public class SageControllerTests
    {
        private Mock<ISageService> _sageServiceMock;
        private SageController _controller;

        [TestInitialize]
        public void Initialise()
        {
            _sageServiceMock = new Mock<ISageService>();

            _controller = new SageController(_sageServiceMock.Object);
        }

        [TestMethod]
        public async Task Delete_returns_a_NotFound()
        {
            _sageServiceMock
                .Setup(x => x.DeleteAsync(_sage.Id))
                .ReturnsAsync(0); // This makes me *so* happy...

            IHttpActionResult result = await _controller.Delete(_sage.Id);

            var notFound = result as NotFoundResult;
            Assert.IsNotNull(notFound);
            _sageServiceMock.Verify(x => x.DeleteAsync(_sage.Id));
        }

        [TestMethod]
        public async Task Delete_returns_an_Ok()
        {
            _sageServiceMock
                .Setup(x => x.DeleteAsync(_sage.Id))
                .ReturnsAsync(1); // I'm still excited now!

            IHttpActionResult result = await _controller.Delete(_sage.Id);

            var ok = result as OkResult;
            Assert.IsNotNull(ok);
            _sageServiceMock.Verify(x => x.DeleteAsync(_sage.Id));
        }
    }
}

But wait.... What if there's like... Nothing?

Nope, I'm not getting into metaphysics. Something more simple. What if the async API you're consuming returns just a Task? Not a Task of int but a simple old humble Task.

So to take our example we're going from this:

public interface ISageService
    {
        Task<int> DeleteAsync(int id);
    }

To this:

public interface ISageService
    {
        Task DeleteAsync(int id);
    }

Your initial thought might be "well that's okay, I'll just lop off the ReturnsAsync statements and I'm home free". That's what I thought anyway.... And I was *WRONG*! A moments thought and you realise that there's still a return type - it's just Task now. What you want to do is something like this:

_sageServiceMock
                .Setup(x => x.DeleteAsync(_sage.Id))
                .ReturnsAsync(void); // This'll definitely work... Probably

No it won't - void is not a real type and much as you might like it to, this is not going to work.

So right now you're thinking, well Moq probably has my back - it'll have something like ReturnsTask, right? Wrong! It's intentional it turns out - there's a discussion on GitHub about the issue. And in that discussion there's just what we need. We can use Task.Delay or Task.FromResult alongside Moq's good old Returns method and we're home free!

Here's one I made earlier...

namespace Proverb.Web.Controllers
{
    // ISageService again included inline for ease of explanation
    public interface ISageService
    {
        Task DeleteAsync(int id);
    }

    public class SageController : ApiController
    {
        ISageService _sageService;

        public SageController(ISageService userService)
        {
            _sageService = userService;
        }

        public async Task<IHttpActionResult> Delete(int id)
        {
            await _sageService.DeleteAsync(id);

            return Ok();
        }
   }
}

namespace Proverb.Web.Tests.ASPNet.Controllers
{
    [TestClass]
    public class SageControllerTests
    {
        private Mock<ISageService> _sageServiceMock;
        private SageController _controller;

        readonly Task TaskOfNowt = Task.Delay(0);
        // Or you could use this equally valid but slightly more verbose approach:
        //readonly Task TaskOfNowt = Task.FromResult<object>(null);

        [TestInitialize]
        public void Initialise()
        {
            _sageServiceMock = new Mock<ISageService>();

            _controller = new SageController(_sageServiceMock.Object);
        }

        [TestMethod]
        public async Task Delete_returns_an_Ok()
        {
            _sageServiceMock
                .Setup(x => x.DeleteAsync(_sage.Id))
                .Returns(TaskOfNowt); // Feels good doesn't it?

            IHttpActionResult result = await _controller.Delete(_sage.Id);

            var ok = result as OkResult;
            Assert.IsNotNull(ok);
            _sageServiceMock.Verify(x => x.DeleteAsync(_sage.Id));
        }
    }
}