TestDriven.NET by Jamie Cansdale

A little while ago I was working on an example that demonstrates the TestDriven.NET extensibility model. It was an example of how to use the TestDriven.Framework.ITestRunner interface which enables native support for different unit testing engines. This is what NUnit, MbUnit and (soon) Zanebug use allow their test types to executed using TestDriven.NET. The Visual Studio Test Tools (VSTT) support uses a deeper extensibility interface which I'll discuss in a future post.

You may be wondering where the 'Test With... NUnit GUI' option has disappeared to in recent builds. I have been working on opening this up so that other test framework providers can include their GUI test runner as an option. In the current build this menu will be auto populated when TestDriven.NET is activated in the Visual Studio process. This means you won't see these options until TestDriven.NET has been activated on demand (you have used one of TD.NET's other buttons) or 'Startup' is checked in the 'Add-in Manager'. The easiest way to 'fix' this would be to install with the activate on start-up option on by default. I'm reluctant to do this however because I don't want to slow Visual Studio's start-up by even a fraction of a second!

James Avery has just put online the latest installment of his 10 must-have tools series. This time it's Ten Visual Studio Add-ins Every Developer Should Download. The CopySourceAsHTML add-in looks particularaly handly. Maybe I should install that and start blogging again. ;o)

You can find instructions on how to get the latest build here.

For the last 6 months I've been a very happy FolderShare customer. It isn't often that I subscribe to an online service, but soon after trying the free version of FolderShare I became a paid up customer. FolderShare allows me to think in terms of logical folders, rather than folders that exist and are maintained on a particular physical machine. In the past I have tried using network shares, Exchange folders or WebDAV to accomplish this, but there was always some limitation that tripped me up. FolderShare on the other hand just works.

I've been working on a maps toolbar for Firefox called 'MutantMaps'. The idea is to allow navigation between all of the popular mapping sites while preserving your longitude, latitude and zoom levels. At the moment Google Maps, MSN Virtual Earth, MultiMap, TerraServer and 192.com are supported. There is also support for navigating from Google Maps/MSN Virtual Earth 'mashup' sites (ie this kind of thing).

It has been a frustrating few days getting 'Test With... Debugger' working again when any of the Beta2 products are installed (VS2005 or Express).  It turns out there are two completely independent issues.  One breaks debugging in VS2003 when installed side-by-side with VS2005.  The other appears to be an issue with the VS2005 debugger itself (it crashes when it can't find one of the PDB files).  I've created a new installer with workarounds for both of these issue.

I have finally got the the bottom of the issue mentioned yesterday.  I can confirm that installing VS2005 beta2 or any of the Express products will break 'Test With... Debugger' in VS2003 (or VS2002).  What makes the situation worse it that uninstalling them won't fix the issue!  The good news is that I now have a patch that seems to work.  I'll explain what causes the issue and how the patch works.