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Announcing the Unit Test Generator Visual Studio Extension BETA

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With Unit Test Generator under the bonnet (hood) … aka vsarUnitTestFx ...‎ we met the first of three major milestones when we shipped the internal Alpha.

Today our product owner gave us the image and announced the public Beta. Here is a copy of his announcement:

I’d like to announce the Beta release of the ALM Rangers Unit Test Generate VS Extension. Now available on the VSGallery . Please download, try it out, dogfood, and provide feedback.

When moving from VS2010 to VS2012 a lot of users missed the old Create Unit Test feature from VS2010. This extension helps to meet that need. It provides a new command to the context menu that allows for generation of a test method skeleton (including class and project if needed). It allows for customization of the naming and flexibility in workflows.

To Install:

  • You can install directly from the VSGallery inside Visual Studio 2012.

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  • Or download from the VSGallery link directly.

This code is a Beta and subject to change. Please provide feedback directly on the Review and Q/A links on VSGallery.

Thanks,

ALM Rangers UnitTestFx Team

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 13, 2013
    PLEASE PLEASE make it clear when you add new tools if they apply to native code! We have had multiple instances of management getting excited about things and having to deflate their expectations because the tools are only for managed code. I'd rather not waste my time digging or, even worse, having to install things to see if they work with c++ and then still be left wondering if it's because of the complexity of our environment or a fundamental lack in tool.

  • Anonymous
    June 14, 2013
    @Andy, good feedback. I double checked the release notes and the overview quick reference sheet, both of which specify .NET C#/VB support at this stage. I will make sure we highlight the native and/or managed code support in future blog posts for clarity.

  • Anonymous
    June 16, 2013
    I would love to see If it can support other Testing frameworks too while auto generating the test cases. Good to have a setup once wizard to setup the unit test frameworks info at solution level.

  • Anonymous
    June 18, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2013
    Wow. I am really, really underwhelmed at this production. You ... made a class, marked it as a TestClass, and made a test, and annotated it as a TestMethod. That's IT? after almost a year, the only difference I see between what your extension produced & what I got from the Unit Test template is the addition of Assert.Fail() in the TestMethod. Assert.Fail, indeed. For anyone who liked the old functionality (you, know the FUNCTIONAL functionality), here is a post about how to re-enable that menu option. serena-yeoh.blogspot.de/.../visual-studio-2012-create-unit-test.html

  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2013
    @Michael, I'm sorry to hear you are unhappy with this release. You are correct, from a pure code generation standpoint we have very basic functionality. We talked to a lot of customers during the VS 2012 development cycle. What we found in our conversations were the majority of people found the code generated to be of limited usefulness. Lots of people made the comment that when using the previous tool, they deleted the code generated. For many people the primary value in the project creation, references creation and stub test method code skeleton. For these reasons we focused a bit more on that functionality for our initial release. We'd love to hear more feedback to ensure we are getting the correct read from the developer community. This is the Beta release and we pushed this out quickly in order to get this exact feedback. :) I'd really appreciate if we can dig a bit deeper into the functionality you feel is the core value from this tool (what you consider the FUNCTIONAL functionality :) ). If you'd prefer email you can send to me directly at joshweb at microsoft dot com.

  • Anonymous
    July 09, 2015
    We need Create UNit test feature back, this new beta is just kidding us

  • Anonymous
    July 09, 2015
    @Vinod, this extension was a prototype and never intended to replace the Unit Test feature. Our intent was to investigate principles as outlined on visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/45208924-e7b0-45df-8cff-165b505a38d7 and bring the feature back to Visual Studio. Please explore Visual Studio 2015, which re-introduces the feature (and more) as outlined in: Creating unit test method stubs with "Create Unit Tests" (blogs.msdn.com/.../creating-unit-test-stubs.aspx).