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.

New Unit Testing Features in Orcas (Part 1)

nnaderi — Sat, 12 May 2007 01:03:00 GMT

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

I know that MSTest isn’t yet the darling of the TDD world, but I’d like to think that our TDD story has improved a decent amount in Orcas. These are some of the improvements:

1 – Better Execution Times: We have rewritten our test execution engine to significantly improve the time that it takes to execute unit tests from the command prompt and via the IDE.

2 – Run Tests: We have added a menu item to execute the tests in the current context of the test class’ code. Executing “Run Tests” from a right click context menu will execute the best guess of the tests we think you would like to execute. Therefore if the focus is on a test method, Run tests will execute the test method, if the focus is in a test class, Run Tests will execute all the tests in the test class, if the focus is in the test results window, Run Tests will execute the tests which are checked, etc. Ctl R, T also accesses this command. I think you guys will love it.

3 – Short Cut Keys to Run Tests: We have added in a lot of short cut keys to kick off a test quickly. They are as follows:

· Ctl R, T: Run Tests in Current context (see #2)

· Ctl R, C: Run Tests in Current Test Class

· Ctl R, N: Run Tests in Current Namespace

· Ctl R, S: Run All Tests in Solution

· Ctl R, D: Run the Tests in the Last Test Run

· Ctl R, F: Run the Failed Tests of the Last Test Run

Holding Ctl while pressing the second key in the key combo executes the tests with the debugger. We hope that these additions will significantly improve the TDD flow.

4 – Disable Deployment: As many of you are aware, MSTest currently “deploys” tests for every test run it executes. This means that in addition to generating a Test Results (trx) file, it also copies all the test binaries, code coverage files and debug information to a deployment folder, where the tests are executed. This design provides for convenient features for collaboration, specifically publishing old test results and their deployments, allowing another team member to re-run the tests and step through a test run. It is however, inconvenient for TDD users, since most TDD’ers want their tests to execute as fast as possible. We have therefore added an option in the Test Run Configuration to disable deployment. To do so, go to the Test Run Configuration file in a Test Project (double click on *.testrunconfig in solution explorer), Deployment, and uncheck “Enable deployment.”

5 – Inheritance of Tests: In Whidbey, we did not support the inheritance of tests methods or initializations. We have added support for inheritance in Orcas. I’m planning to use a future post to dive in to the nitty gritties of Test Inheritance.

6 – Directly go to the Point of Failure: We have enabled an option in Orcas to directly jump to the point of failure. We have made the stack trace in the Test Results window clickable as well. To specify that double clicking on a failed test result takes you to the first element in the stack trace, go to Tools->Options->Test Tools -> Test Execution and check the last box in the window.

Props to Alan Ridlehoover, Peter Provost and Peli de Halleux for their help in trying to get the TDD experience right. J

Testmundo : Unit Testing

New Unit Testing Features in Orcas (Part 2)

New Unit Testing Features in Orcas (Part 1)