RedGate .NET Demon

Hi there.

Just seen this for the first time today:

http://www.red-gate.com/products/dotnet-development/dotnet-demon/

"Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer" as they say. :)

I'm sticking with NCrunch, does everything I need to be honest.

Cheers.
Jas.

Hi Jas,

Thanks for sharing this. I've been aware of this tool for a while, and I know there are also others in the works. Continuous testing is an easy field to play in, but it takes considerable investment to build a product that works well for everyone. I would only ask people that they judge a tool by the value it gives them rather than the way it is marketed or the name behind it.

Hi there.

No worries.

I'll be honest, I've tried other CT tools in the past (like AutoTest.NET, MightyMoose, and ContinousTest) and they weren't that special for me (ContinousTest resulted in my having to re-install VS 2010 since it broke it!)

NCrunch has worked great from the first time I used it, and the improvements in recent versions make it even better. I've showed it to my colleagues at work and they really like the tool. Excellent job, heck of an achievement really, when you take account of what must be going on under the hoods to deliver such a work of art. Awesome stuff :)

Cheers.
Jas.

I haven't tried the RedGate product, but the first thing I noticed about NCrunch is that I didn't notice it ;) I mean, it's there are I can see the line coverage, but it stays out of my way and just does it's job. I can't imagine a continuous testing tool doing much better than that.

I've evaluated the field and definitely like NCrunch the best. Here's my feedback:

MightyMoose: The graph display is flashy rather than helpful, simple tooltips work better. The risk indicators are presumptuous and often innapprioriate. Having red and yellow lights that aren't warranted is just annoying. I don't really care about static v. heuristic prioritization as long as whatever the approach is performs well. And for me it does. Some tests were erroneously shown as failing. Doesn't continously test - you need to save first. Configuration is pretty basic.

.NET Demon: Continuous save is a horribly broken feature - exploratory changes to code without wanting to save is something I do many times a day. Tool tips are good but not as detailed as NCrunch. Very basic configuration.

Giles: Needs to integrate with Visual Studio because that's where all my workflow is. Sorry!

NCrunch: A clear winner - continous test reacting to code changes without saving is perfect. Level of feedback onscreen showing code coverage and execution times is the nicest of all the tools. Love the exception details. I do think it would benefit from it's own tray-lane as it does interfere with R# bulbs and this is a minor annoyance. We have a lot of multithreaded unit tests that use WaitAll() which NCrunch can't handle in 1.38b due to use of STA thread - this is a major annoyance but I am sure it will be fixed. The level of configuration is great. Works well with source control for persisting solution settings and omitting user-specific settings. Decent manual/wiki on the website which others lack. Not sure how useful the risk progress bar is... I don't really use it. The corner indicator is great! Shows really useful info with just the right amount of presence.

Feature suggestion: Extend code coverage to work like dotCover with actual code highlighted, use tray-lane for performance data/test coverage.
Business suggestion: Do a deal with Jetbrains! This product has great synergy with R#/dotCover, and I'm sure they'll have something competing if you guys don't colloborate. I would be totally happy to pay for this product.