When Microsoft announced that Whidbey would include unit testing, a lot of people thought that it would mean the death of nUnit as we know it. Well one year later, it seems that rumours of the death of nUnit at the hands of VSTS are very much exaggerated. In-fact I don’t know of a single developer that is using the Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting framework. In this post I offer to the Visual Studio team, some of my thoughts why, in my experience, their stuff is not being adopted with hope that they will correct the situation. 1. You should be able to run nUnit tests in Visual Studio 2005.
Before you run out and say, but you can run unit tests in Whidbey, I am referring to tests that have been written using the nunit framework, using the Test View and Test Manager. You should be able to open a project with nUnit tests and boom, they appear as a test asset like any other in the Test view window. I can’t think of any good reason, commercial or other why you can’t do this, especially as nUnit uses the zlib/libpng license.
2. Unit testing should be in all versions of Visual Studio.
Unit testing is such a fundamental part of modern software testing that it should be a ubiquitous feature. Users of VS professional are not going to upgrade to the VSTS developer SKU for this feature when nunit is available instead. That’s right Mr. architect, no testing for you either.
3. Microsoft’s stuff is better, but no one knows it.
It supports data driven tests, it has implementaiton-to-test and test-to-method code generators. It creates accessors for private methods, but most developers don’t use this stuff. Hardcore TDD guys use resharper, and everyone just creates their test classes by hand.
4. You can’t run tests without a full VSTS license.
You can use MSTest.exe to run tests without Visual Studio, but you can’t escape the fact that to get MSTest you need VSTS. You should be able to call tests programatically without needing the full version of Visual Studio installed.
Essentially, these tools show that no matter how good the tools, if you don’t market them correctly they simply won’t be adopted.
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