Extensions for NCrunch

Hi Remco,

I'm interested in writing extensions for NCrunch, do you have any plan to make NCrunch support extensions?

Cheers

Yes! There are long term plans for this. I'm not yet sure which version it will be introduced (probably either V2 or V3). It was left out of V1 because of the need to ensure the architecture was stable before encouraging others to build code on it.

If you can share any details about what kind of extensions you hope to write (and what kind of API would be useful), this will help with forward planning.


Cheers,

Remco

That's great! I never seriously used Visual Studio SDK before. Today I took a look and found it very interesting.

Currently I plan to make a small tool window that displays failed tests and their stack trace.

It would be nice if we could write a plugins to run tests on frameworks which are not supported natively by ncrunch.
For example If I get new framework to test JavaScript in my project then I could write a plugin for ncrunch to run these tests, determine if my framework allows asynchronous testing etc.

That would roks :)

Thanks for your feedback on this! There are still long term plans to introduce something in this area, although I think you'll find that any solution in this space won't allow for development of plugins that support non .NET languages. This is because these languages would require a completely different runtime environment, build process and instrumentation strategy in order to work correctly with NCrunch.

Although I will certainly take your vote for future Javascript support :)

Thanks!

In web development, no JavaScript testing is painful :)
Let me put this more accurately: no automated JavaScript testing.
Especially as more and more projects use WebAPI on the server side, and most of the application guts is written in JS frameworks like AngularJS etc.

I definitely second being able to write plugins for running tests, especially for JS. I appreciate it might be difficult for other languages, but I think it could still be done. I've managed to work out a system where I have an NUnit test fixture which starts a self-hosted web server on a specific port, then fires up karma and PhantomJS to run Jasmine tests which connect to the web server so we can have full end-to-end testing, then I use NUnit's TestCaseSource to parse the result file into distinct tests which get displayed individually in NCrunch.

It works OK, but it's pretty convoluted and clunky. The JS tests get run automatically by NCrunch now, but they take a good 10 seconds to run (most of which is spent spinning up PhantomJS each time), there's no code coverage, they don't properly pick up changes all the time, it can't automatically take you to the point of failure, etc. The case above is especially convoluted because I want to run the web server for the JS tests to connect to. In the more general case, I'd love to just be able to keep the karma runner going in the background, which runs the tests continuously anyway as I change JS files in my solution, then have NCrunch pick up some output file that gets updated frequently, or send results to it as they happen or something.