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New Workspace for Unit Testers

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We've been fixing Workspaces big time for the last two months and I think the results are noticeable (as I mentioned in my last post). I love getting the kudos, so if you've noticed the change, let me know--and if you haven't, let me know as well. While there's room for improvement, my goal is to continue to get better every month. Also, in July, we start telling you more about 1-2 other options you'll have on GotDotNet.

In the meantime, with Workspaces starting to operate consistently, it's a lot more fun to talk about the different projects that are going up there. The latest comes from Jim Newkirk of the GotDotNet team. In words of Sy Sperling of the Hair Club For Men, he's not only works for GDN, but he's also a client (for those who have no idea what I am talking about, Hair Club for Men had a 1970s commercial during daytime TV--yes, I watched too many Hogan Heroes reruns during my summer vacations).

As I am sure most of you are aware, NUnit is an open source utility (application and library) that allows you to write unit tests and then automates the tests through a simple GUI, which will show you which tests passed and failed. Jim was a key contributor to NUnit before coming to Microsoft, which is why he is asked to speak to several groups at Microsoft about it. NUnit was vital in building out EntLib and I think it is a primary reason for the tremendous kudos it has gotten for code quality. Plus, we shipped those tests and many customers told me that was the best part of EntLib because it allows them to modify the code and ensure the changes don’t affect the integrity of the original code.

Now, VSTS has built a unit testing utility that runs inside the VS IDE, but it is syntactically different from NUnit. Jim has provided feedback to VSTS in building their tool. Given his intimate knowledge of both VSTS and NUnit, he was the perfect person to write a converter for NUnit tests. There were a lot of late nights coding this thing (this is a case of above-and-beyond), but people have been asking for it and Jim took it upon himself to do it. So, for those of you getting your hands dirty with Beta 2, this is a great opportunity to get a little deeper with the unit testing feature. Plus, we're hoping to eventually post the source code so that those who are interested can help evolve the code with new features in the future.

The workspace is located at: https://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/nunitaddons

Enjoy and be sure to let me and Jim know what you think.

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