In the last few years the tooling available to .net developers for unit testing in general has matured, these are some of the tools  that I either used or heard of :

Continuous Integration:

  • Team City: I use it and really like it, simple to set up and use, if you want to try it they have a free professional edition .

  • Cruise Control.net: Open source, used it but didn’t find it too friendly, I’m aware a lot of people use it

  • Hudson. Originally a Java only project but there are some success stories on the .net fence, has some features unavailable in the other two mentioned above.

  • there must be something else. ?

BDD Frameworks

  • StoryQ:  This is what I use. Like it because you write C# code with some constraints and it generates reports on the behaviour. Samples: code report

  • Cukes/Cucumber: I remember the first time I saw cucumber in action I was really impressed, however it’s hard to get buy in for a tool that requires another language installed, probably fine for some projects, it depends a lot on the project, the company and the culture.

  • SpecFlow:  you write features in Gherkin(the cucumber spec language) that are then compiled into c# code. Nice reports, but I find the generated code hard to read… ie a bit too verbose (example feature example generated code) however I wouldnt discard it totally.

  • NSpec:  You write c# code (very lambda-y)  and it generates reports.. like it even less for reasons similar to the above,  have a look at it yourself here

  • Fit/fitnesse:  I haven’t tried it, it supposed to be very good, I ll leave that one to you (would love some feedback on this if anyone reading did try it)

Unit Testing Frameworks.

  • xUnit: a nice, compact unit test framework, I like it because it has less noise,  no setup method (ie it uses the ctor for

  • nUnit:  The most popular one.

  • mbUnit: good support for RowTests.

  • _

  • msTests: the option by Microsoft. I tried this framework when it came out, so perhaps not valid anymore. My experience with it was that the same set of test ran 20% slower. Also it had poor support for theory tests. Maybe this all changed. I will guess that anyone using this framework does it because they can’t use anything else

Builds

  • Psake:  powershel based DSL for building

  • Rake:  Ruby based Dsl for builds, nice to use ruby, but sometimes needing the ruby dependency is a deal breaker

  • Nant: not something I would choose, but hey if you like xml this is the way to go (if you like Xml you might want to talk to your doctor too ;) )

  • MSBuild:  I find it non intuitive, I thought I was being unfair so I asked in twitter what ppl thought of it. One supporter and 4 not really happy with it (see below)

  • Final Builder : a commercial option, and not a bad one to be honest. Very easy to use (drag drop style) tho not as flexible as we needed.

Code Coverage

  •  NCover: does the job but I think the generated graph could be better. Running the tool was cumbersome too as far as I remember

  •  dotCover : really nice and integrated with resharper, it a bit rough around the edges with lambdas and other minor things, but a tool I use day to day

Feedback and anything that wasn’t mentioned yet , please feel free to comment

Cheers

Updated:

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