I am of the opinion that automating the build and unit testing and everything that goes along with it is a great idea.  I am not in the Test Driven camp.  I also like Continuous Integration but not when first starting up a project because it would break every 5 seconds.  I also think that there is a place for documentation.  Here is why.  When on a long project with consultants where the team is changing XP is not all that great.  Because the new people coming on have nothing to get them up to speed.  No documentation and having the customer intimately involved in the development doesn’t work in consulting if the project is long running or the team is changing.

My 2 cents.

Very disappointed in teams systems Unit Testing.

I hope this feedback gets back to Microsoft (either through my blog or feedback from MVPs at the MVP summit).

There is a great article over at ondotnet.com about .Net Unit testing.  There are so many tools available for automating code testing.  Sean McCormack (C# MVP) gave a great presentation at the WI INETA Users group and of course I wrote one of the first books to cover NUnit and NAnt.  Here are some of the tools:

Nunit – the tool that started it all!

TestDriven.NET

MbUnit

BadBoy

NUnitForms

NunitASP

ZaneBug

Here are some great blog posts on Unit Testing:

Unit Testing . NET Projects

Qualities of a Good Unit Test

Generating Unit Tests…

Initialization and Cleanup for Unit Tests in Team System Developer

The Test Feasability Matrix
Unit Testing Best Practices

Unit test readability should not come in place of maintainability - they go hand in hand

Power Session on Writing Good Code 

So what am I complaining about?  I am complaining that the MSBuild and MSTest are not free.  I understand Microsoft wanting money for the code coverage, profiling, bug tracking, source control etc… But it would not have hurt them to give their MSBuild and MSTest away for free.  I have spoken to Alex Kipman about this and I know he is in agreement with me.  I would love to know that MSBuild is in the .Net redist.  Not just the sdk and the testing framework is in the sdk.  This would open the door to so many things.  I know that they are providing a NUnit Converter v0.5 which is useful.  But the fact that they are not supporting NUnit or releasing their testing for free is bad for the .Net Unit Testing community.