Unit Test Generator v1.2 and Tim’s Gremlins
The vsarUnitTestFx (Unit Test Generator) team has just finished the testing of the latest version of the extension v1.2.
Start exploring the extension by Exploring the Unit Test Generator VS Extension v1.RC.
v1.2 – What’s New?
Similar to v1.1 this latest release is a bug fix release, which resolves the bug “9205 - Configuration dialog does not appear by default as expected”.
- Right-click in the scope of a public class or method.
- Select the “Generate Unit Test” feature.
- With v1.2 you are now faced with the Create Unit Test Configuration Dialog.
- You can select whether to show the dialog on each run (default) or not. As before, you can also find the dialog in the TEST menu.
Tested Project Types
The test team validated the following project types as part of the regression and feature test suite:
- Windows Store - Grid App
- Windows Store - Class Library
- Windows Store - Windows Runtime Library
- Windows Store - Unit Test Library
- Windows: Windows Forms Application
- Windows: WPF Application
- Windows: Console Application
- Windows: Class Library
- Windows: Windows Service
- Windows: WPF Custom Control Library
- Windows: WPF User Control Library
- Windows: Forms Control Library
- Web: ASP.NET Web Forms Application
- Web: ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application
- Web: ASP.NET Server Control
- WCF: WCF Service Library
- WCF: WCF Service Application
Tim’s Gremlins
While Darren Rich is single handed driving Treasure Map development team to tears and has delayed the planned release of v2.1 with his phenomenal testing 
and tenacious push-back, we have anther star in the Unit Test Generator team. Tim Star has done in-depth code reviews, given Rob Jarratt candid feedback and completed multiple and comprehensive test runs. As a consequence, many of the issues resulting in the Unit Test Generator feature from not being available are referred to as Tim’s Gremlins 
Here are a few examples when the feature will be disabled …
class is not public
class is public, but contains no public methods
class is public, but focus is on an operator
class is public, contains a public method, but the code has an issue, i.e. missing ()’s
Difference between proof of concept and feature re-enablement!
We have received a number of feedback, ranging from “excellent feature” to “bring original feature” back, which necessitates a brief discussion of the teams objectives.
- The extension is not about feature re-enablement and the team intentionally did not use the old feature as a base or reference.
- The extension is based on features we highlighted during discussions with developers and testers. The core value seems to be in the generation of the test project, references and ability to choose the test framework, not the generated test stubs.
- The extension is a proof-of-concept, not a product. We are in the process of experimenting with concepts and principles and the extension may be considered small and incomplete. Its evolution depends on your candid feedback!
- The extension is not focused on test code generation (yet). The intent for v1 was to focus on the generation of the project, references and introduce configuration of code generation. The generated test stubs are intentionally trivial. For vNext there are discussions around the use of T4 templates and/or exposing an extensibility point to enable developers to manage the stub generation themselves.
What’s Next?
Good question … what would you like to see next?
Comments
Anonymous
November 22, 2013
Great to see you're supporting women who've lost husbands ("Widows Service") - probably should consider supporting Widowers too :-)Anonymous
November 23, 2013
Guess you found another gremlin :)Anonymous
January 05, 2014
Just fired up the extension, looks like a great start. Where can I find the source code so I can contribute? I'd really like to see the settings be stored ('dont ask me' doesn't fill me with confidence when each time it asks me it has forgotten what I entered last time), and without access to the code, can't really help :(Anonymous
January 20, 2014
Good to have support for Private, Protected and Internal Methods. Thanks.Anonymous
February 01, 2014
In addition to public methods, it would be nice to have all mockable dependencies created as private members. Also, I would like to see Initialize() / Cleanup() stub methods created, and if possible, identify a mocking framework and have all dependencies auto-initialize with mocks or stubs. Finally, it would be nice if test methods could be auto-generated wherever a dependency interaction exists. Example:
namespace Hello.World { public class Foo { private IBarService _barService; public Foo(IBarService barService) { _barService = barService; } public void DoSomething() { _barService.Blah() } } } would result in something like: namespace Hello.World.Tests { [TestClass] public class FooTest { private Foo _foo; private IBarService _barService; [TestInitialize] public void InitializeTests() { _barService = MockingFramework.Create<IBarService>(); _foo = new Foo(_barService); } [TestMethod] public void DoSomething_Should_Call_Blah_On_BarService() { Assert(_barService.Blah.WasCalled); } } }
Anonymous
February 19, 2014
I've installed the Unit Test Generator and restarted VS 2013, but I'm still not seeing the context menu to Generate Unit Tests. Any idea what I've got wrong? The Configurat option is available under the Test menu.Anonymous
February 19, 2014
@Trent, is focus on a "public" class and method? Can you share a snippet of sample code?Anonymous
February 19, 2014
That was the issue. Thanks!Anonymous
August 16, 2014
Add me to the increasingly massive list of people to ignore who are asking to test non-public methods. It would be nice to not have to find-replace everything with "public" just to work around your dogma.Anonymous
October 31, 2014
Thank you, this is a real time saver and much appreciated!Anonymous
May 27, 2015
The comment has been removed