Unit Testing Trickling into Pro!

nnaderi — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 20:40:00 GMT

Due to popular demand we have decided to add the majority of the unit testing features of Team System to the Pro Sku of Visual Studio. With the release of Orcas, the support for authoring, generating and running unit tests, will become available to the users of the Pro Sku of Visual Studio. Pro customers will also take advantage of the some of the unit testing improvements we have added into Orcas, specifically generating for generics, performance improvements, the ability to unit test devices and better IDE integration (I’ll try my best to blog on the details soon). We are in general very open to the concept of trickling down other functionality introduced in Team System into other Skus over time, so please let us know if you feel that other items should trickle down as well. Keeping this pattern keeps us on our toes to ensure that we are always adding high value features higher up the stack. We love hearing your feedback and take your suggestions very seriously (I’m not just saying this - I have been continually surprised at how much time is spent on user’s feedback).

Again, we are very excited about the trickle down as we hope that it will introduce the concept of unit testing to the average .Net developer. Our team hopes that every developer will see the major benefits of unit testing and will regularly author and execute the tests throughout the product life cycle.

To the beta users: you may notice that a few pieces of the unit testing puzzle is missing from the Pro Versions of Beta 1 – specifically, authoring test lists, remotely executing tests and generating code coverage results. We have been debating if some of these features should also trickle down and would be very interested in your feedback. For example, the ability to author test lists has been excluded from the Pro Sku since many felt that its chief benefit comes to those which author test lists and run them as a part of a Build Verification Test prior to checking code into Team Foundation Server. Some, however feel that it is still convenient to organize tests in a list regardless of check-ins. How do you feel? Does the test list editor (formerly called Test Manager) belong in Pro?

Happy Unit Testing,

Naysawn

Comparing the MSTest and Nunit Frameworks

nnaderi — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 00:40:00 GMT

I haven't seen much information online comparing the similarities and differences between the Nunit and MSTest Frameworks. Here I will define the similarities and some of the differences. If there is anything else which you come upon, please do add it to the comments.

MSTest Attribute	NUnit Attribute	Purpose
[TestMethod]	[Test]	Indentifies of an individual unit test
[TestClass]	[TestFixture]	Identifies of a group of unit tests, all Tests, and Initializations/Clean Ups must appear after this declaration
[ClassInitialize]	[TestFixtureSetUp]	Identifies a method which should be called a single time prior to executing any test in the Test Class/Test Fixture
[ClassCleanup]	[TestFixtureTearDown]	Identifies a method in to be called a single time following the execution of the last test in a TestClass/TestFixture
[TestInitialize]	[SetUp]	Identifies a method to be executed each time before a TestMethod/Test is executed
[TestCleanUp]	[TearDown]	Identifies a method to be executed each time after a TestMethod/Test has executed
[AssemblyInitialize]	N/A	Identifies a method to be called a single time upon before running any tests in a Test Assembly
[AssemblyCleanUp]	N/A	Identifies a method to be called a single time upon after running all tests in a Test Assembly

The order of execution is similar in both frameworks, but there are some differences between the two:

In Nunit, tests are not executed in parallel. Rather, it appears that all tests execute on a single thread. In MSTest, each test is instantiated on a separate thread, this results the runs being interleaved. Therefore, if test A depends on test B for its success, it likely will fail as test B will likely start running as test A is running.
The time at which ClassCleanUp/TestFixtureTearDown executes is different between the two frameworks. In Nunit, TestFixtureTearDown is executed immediately following the completion of the last test in a TestFixture or after TearDown if the attribute exists for the test in question. In the Whidbey implementation of MsTest, ClassCleanUp executes at the end of a test run, before AssemblyCleanUp but not necessarily immediately after the last test in a TestClass has completed executing.
In Whidbey, support for test class inheritance was missing. In Nunit, it is fully supported. This will be rectified in Orcas.

I should also mentioned that in MsTest, TestContext exists for passing information about the test run. There is no equivalent in Nunit tests. This can serve as a handy tool for pulling information from datasources on the disk to the unit tests, as well as other uses. More can be read about it here.

Testmundo : Unit Test Framework

Unit Testing Trickling into Pro!

Comparing the MSTest and Nunit Frameworks