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Randy Holloway at Microsoft

Blogging from the field.
Unit Testing in VS2005 Push Back

A few folks are pushing back on Peter's petition for unit testing features in versions of Visual Studio other than the "Team System" versions. I think that Peter's request is not unreasonable, but as some other people have pointed out there are other options available for unit testing. Also, Mike G. comments that if you expect a new feature like this you should be willing to trade off other features (or have VS2005 ship later). I'm more concerned about the number of Visual Studio versions that we're going to have, as opposed to which features are contained in which versions. The confusion could be terrible if we maintain so many versions of the tools.

Posted: Monday, June 14, 2004 10:38 PM by RandyHolloway

Comments

kent tegels said:

Not even Microsoft is big enough to be all things to all people. At least, not yet. :)
# June 14, 2004 8:56 PM

Jeff Clark said:

The "pushing back" arguments are pretty dumb though. Microsoft to my knowledge hasn't said any of those things. And they wouldn't unless they had a reason to. Now if in response to the petition they came out with some statement then an argument could be made. However in lieu of that all we can do is voice our opinion and hope someone offically responds. Is there a technical reason for this? Was it a marketing decision? All we've heard from Microsoft is that you get it with VSTS or it's "no soup for you!" Nobody has come out and said "We'd like to put it in other versions but it would delay them" or "here are the reasons why it's in VSTS". I'm not even sure that anyone has said that VSTS will come out later than VS.

From the outside looking in it appears all unit testing has to integrate with is the core IDE and compiler and therefore it seems like it would be relatively easy to distribute it and static analysis and the profiler with the core Visual Studio. (What is "team" about those things?) Perhaps that's an incorrect assumption....however as we do not work on the VSTS team how could we possibly know unless someone explains?
# June 15, 2004 8:23 AM

shawn hinsey said:

You mention that there are other options, which of course, there are, but I was wondering if there is any promise of source compatibility with the other options? (I assume this means NUnit, in particular.) If the VSTS Unit tests will run under NUnit and vice versa, this to me is much less of an issue.
# June 15, 2004 1:36 PM
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