Visual Studio 2010 Testing Tools Resources
A core piece of the testing for the Dynamics AX ecosystem strategy is the testing capabilities of Visual Studio 2010. I’ve provide a brief overview in previous posts. This post will provide some more details and references to many more details about this exciting new VS capability.
Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 came out last October. I spent some time over the holidays getting the Team Foundation Server (TFS) portion of it set up on a spare PC in my office. One of the major improvements of TFS 2010 is support for more types of deployments. For example, it can be installed on a client - similar to what was suggested in my TFS Express? post last April. TFS is also much easier to install and the install worked seamlessly as advertised for me. Brian Harry, a Microsoft Technical Fellow and the leader of the TFS team, has a very good post on these improvements titled TFS 2010 for SourceSafe Users. As the title suggests, a key part of the post is making TFS 2010 as accessible to the development community as Visual SourceSafe. This is very good news for the Dynamics ecosystem since many partners and customers have small development shops where overhead needs to be kept to a minimum.
VS 2010 Beta2 represents a refinement of the testing capabilities provided by the Beta1 Microsoft Test and Lab Manager. This standalone client is tailored for the generalist, or manual, tester and has many capabilities that can streamline and improve testing for Dynamics partners and customers. There are too many capabilities for me to do justice to in this and other posts. Fortunately, the Microsoft engineers writing the Visual Studio Team Test blog are the experts and have been very prolific in their writing about the test capabilities in VS 2010. Since Beta2 was announced on the blog on October 20th, they have made 70 posts to the blog! That’s about one post per work day, so there’s plenty of reading for those of us who want to learn more about the capabilities and background behind VS 2010 testing tools.
Another very interesting capability in VS2010 is the Lab Management functionality. Lab Management provides capabilities for integration of virtual machines into the Application Lifecycle Management process. One simple example of this would be to execute a set of automated tests in a virtual environment as part of a nightly build process. The Visual Studio Lab Management Team blog walks the reader specifically through this scenario. While not as prolific as the Test Team blog, the Lab Management blog also has some great information.
VS 2010 Team System has some awesome capabilities for the Dynamics ecosystem. The integration of source code control, work item tracking, bug tracking, lab management, and test management in a single, low overhead, package will help Dynamics partners and customers deliver higher quality software more efficiently. Check it out!