New in RC Live Unit Testing is a new feature we are introducing and only present in the Enterprise edition of Visual Studio. This feature visualizes unit test results and code coverage live on the editor, while you are coding. It works with C#/VB projects for .NET framework and supports three test frameworks of MSTest, xUnit, and NUnit. This is an early preview of this feature and has several known issues.
My twitter feed was alive with this when I woke up today. I haven't given it a spin yet ... but a few interesting facts:
- It will only be available for VS Enterprise (not VS Pro or lower tier SKUs)
- It's still early days. This product has so far only seen a few months of development (vs NCrunch at 7 years and counting)
- It's internal architecture is very different to NCrunch. For example, there is no workspacing of source code. I expect the experience when using it may be quite different.
- Many people aren't aware that free versions of NCrunch-like tools have been available for .NET since 2010. In a business sense and from my side of things, this doesn't really change things much.
- There has been no shortage of interest in NCrunch over the years. The product has a sizable following of very enthusiastic developers. Even if Microsoft's new feature brings down the sky, NCrunch will still be around.
It's great to see continuous testing finally getting the attention it deserves. Microsoft building this into their base platform certainly underlines the value of this concept. Hopefully we'll finally see others also implement it on other platforms.
Great, doesn't seem like you're jumping ship on NCrunch development :)
NCrunch clearly has a tonne more functionality that the VS feature won't have for a long time / ever. Stuff like distributed processing. And as you said, it being an Enterprise only feature limits its usage numbers A LOT. With that said, CodeLens started out as an Enterprise feature IIRC and ended up being made available in a lower tier, so who knows.
Seems to be very limited and while a nice addition to have out of the box in a future VS release, currently not usable in production, at least for me (attributes, categories, appdomains, etc.). As Remco said it will take years until all the issues and special cases are solved and who knows if Microsoft is even supporting this a year from now.
Let's get to the real question: When will NCrunch be available for VS 2017? That would make VS 2017 usable for TDD and enjoyable :)