I’ve just started to work on a project where we want to apply Test-Driven Development (TDD) methodology. Since not all the developers are going to have Team System, we can’t rely on the built in features for unit testing. Because of that, we’re using NUnit (www.nunit.org) for the unit tests.

 

A few months ago I’ve learned about this little free tool called Test-Driven.NET (www.testdriven.net). This tool integrates unit testing within Visual Studio, regardless of whether we’re using NUnit or Team System’s test framework. In a few words, say you’re working on a test class and you want to run an individual test method, all you have to do is right click within the method’s body and select "Run Test". The test results are shown right on the interface. One can also set a breakpoint and "Run Test with Debugger".

 

One can also right click anywhere on the class and select "Run Tests" to run every test on the class, or do the same on the project, to run all tests within the specific project.

 

Here’s another useful little thing I just found out yesterday: I have a test class with a private helper method that returns a custom object needed by a test method. By accident, I’ve right-clicked on this helper method and selected Run Test. Test-Driven actually ran the code within that method, and dumped the object on the output window (listing all properties and their values on the output window). That little feature alone just helped me troubleshooting an issue I was having, right on.