New Unit Testing Features in Orcas (Part 2)

nnaderi — Mon, 14 May 2007 03:07:00 GMT

This is a part of a series of postings on the details of some of the new features appearing in Orcas. All these features will be available in Orcas beta 2.

Gaining Access to Private Code under test:

In Whidbey, we introduced the concept of private accessors to provide users with an easy way to access private members of code under test. Private Accossors served as a wrapper for reflection, consisting of shadow implementations of the methods of a class which provided access to a private field or method through a reflection call - hiding all the nitty gritties of reflection from the user. Although, it seems that users love the concept, we decided to rewrite the feature to make it more robust in Orcas.

In Orcas, we decided to change private accessors from being code based to assembly based. The assembly based assessors are more robust and are picked up by intelliscene and auto-regeneration when the code under test has changed. As in Whidbey, Orcas private accessors are automatically generated whenever generating unit tests for private methods, they can be manually generated by right clicking inside the code editor and selecting Create Private Accessor. Generating private accessors can also be achieved via the command line via running publicize.exe (new in Orcas). I have the impression that the majority of users are still unaware of this cool feature, so I hope more will play with it in Orcas Beta 2 and RTM.

Generating Unit Tests:

For those new to unit testing, VSTS contains a nice feature to generate an outline of a unit test for a given method of code under test. In Orcas, we have re-written the generation engine to be more robust, to work more intelligently with the code under test and to functional with the new assembly based private accessors. We have also beefed it up to better support .Net languages, specifically .Net reflection.

Support for Device Projects:

In Orcas, we introduce support for unit testing on embedded devices. All the functionality described, in these posts, and that which was present in Whidbey will be accessible to device programmers.

Automatic Cleanup of Test Results and Their Associated Deployments

One of the pain points we often hear from customers concerns deployments inadvertently filling their hard drive as they execute more and more tests. To assist these users, we have designed Visual Studio Orcas to automatically remove old deployments when more than 25 test results have filled the Test Project’s Test Results directory. One can change the number of old deployments maintained on disk in Tools->Options->Test Tools->Test Execution.

Testmundo : Devices

New Unit Testing Features in Orcas (Part 2)