Doron's .NET Space

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2: My 5 Minutes Impressions

So I just installed VS 2010 beta 2, played with it for 5 whole minutes, and I have to say it looks pretty damn good.

• Performance was horrid on Beta 1, but now it seems to be much improved.
• Startup time is still too long if you ask me.
• Opening the Fonts and Colors dialog is still the slowest thing in the world.
• But the Add Reference dialog opens really fast! Finally they realized it is better to default on the project reference tab there.
• The new WPF UI is beautiful. I like the “Code Optimized” web settings that remove all the non-critical toolbars and panels and leave lots of room for the code.
• The new IntelliTrace (or historical debugging) feature looks very interesting.
• F# Interactive seems to always be open, even on a C# project. Could be a useful tool, so I should probably get serious about learning F#.

I would also like to point out this excellent article, which talks about the VS2010 architecture. It’s great to see how Microsoft “dogfoods” its own products and in the process makes them better for the rest of us. It stands to reason that if WPF can work for a project like Visual Studio, and TFS can handle the entire Microsoft organization, these could be good choices for us simpletons.

Running VSTS tests without mstest.exe

I’ve been looking at ways to run VSTS tests without using the actual Visual Studio testing framework. It all started when I wanted to integrate code-coverage in our TeamCity daily build. All the solutions I found were using the NUnit runner for this, and while I could have used mstest.exe to run the tests when I’m gathering code-coverage, I didn’t want to. Why? Well, because:

1. TeamCity doesn’t use it to run the tests, so I might get different result from the regular test-run and the code-coverage test-run.
2. It requires me to install Visual Studio on the server.
3. It creates annoying TestResult folders.
4. It requires maintaining a testrun.config file.

In essence, using mstest.exe just seems a lot more cumbersome. Still, all our tests are indeed using the VSTS attributes, so I need a way to run them “NUnit-style”, i.e. without mstest.exe. TestDriven.Net and TeamCity already seem to be doing this, but without exposing anything that I could use. Google did not help, neither. So, I turned to ask at Stackoverflow.com. After a while, an answer was received by a fellow named Bryan Cook: an addin to NUnit exist, but alas, it turns out it doesn’t support the latest NUnit version. Kindly enough, Bryan just went and fixed it. Not a trivial task, mind you, as I had a look at the code, and it seems that the NUnit API went through quite a lot of changes going into version 2.5.

Anyway, you can go over and download the addin from right here. Thanks Bryan!

On a different note, we ended up deciding to switch all our tests to NUnit at the end, but I’m sure this could come handy in the future :)