Team Test

I'm getting into writing tests for a .NET 2.0 project, and I must say that one of the great things about writing unit tests in the Team Test environment is how easy it is to run those tests in the debugger in Visual Studio.

I've also been mentoring a class of .NET newbies, using VS.NET 2003, and I've been forcing them to write NUnit tests to test the code they are writing. They're buying into the process, and running them with the NUnit-gui tool, getting green lights before moving on. However, when their code generates an exception or they want to step through their code to see what it is doing, attaching to the debugger is really hard to help a beginner to do. I tried using TestRunner but it's unreliable at picking up the tests in the projects. And of course, throw in a .config file and the class feels like they are learning more "voodoo science".

Moving from VS.NET 2003 to VS 2005 and Team Test, it was so easy (though I haven't tried using a .config file yet).

I found out this week that my next six-month consulting engagement as some kind of developer team leader, begining Monday, will be using VS 2005, and if I have any influence, I hope we will adopt Team System to some degree during the project. I'm really happy about that, and I really hope that I will be able to guide the team through some best practices, and influence the project managers to adopting some new methods.