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TestDriven.Net Options Pane In the latest version of TestDriven.Net you

TestDriven.Net Options Pane

In the latest version of TestDriven.Net you will find a new options pane. The options are as follows:

Hide trace/debug output when running all tests in project/solution

In the past this setting has always been hardwired to true. It means you can add trace information to a test without cluttering up the Test output pane when all tests are executed. An alternative way to ensure a message will always appear in the output is to use Console.WriteLine rather than Trace.WriteLine . This also means the verbose Gallio/MbUnit test run output will show up when executing all tests in a project.

Cache test process between test runs

By default the external test process will be cached when the Run Test(s) command is used. This process appears in the tool tray as a rocket icon which can be used to kill the process. This is fine unless one of your tests starts leaking leaking native resources (such as leaving open a file handle). The best solution is to fix the resource leak, but you now have to option to work around the issue by killing the test process at the end of each test run. This can be useful if the resource leak is in a 3rd party DLL which can t be easily be changed.

Categories

This option supports the most common use of test categories; you can choose to include or exclude a selection of categories. This is useful if you want to exclude long running tests or if your machine isn t configured to execute integration tests. This feature is currently only supported by the NUnit runner that comes with TestDriven.Net, but I believe it will be supported by a a future version of Gallio.

You can specify your NUnit test categories like this:

    [Test, Category("LongRunning")] 
    public void LongRunning() 
    { 
        Thread.Sleep(10000); 
    } 

There are lots of features in TestDriven.Net that could be exposed as options. I ll try to resist this temptation as much as possible, but I m sure a few more will creep in.

Exploring Scala’s Support for Concurrent Programming
In the latest installment of his IBM developerWorks series on Scala, Ted Neward explores some of Scala’s concurrency-related APIs.

VS 2008 crashes on startup when ‘Code Analysis Tools’ feature is not installed

Now that Visual Studio 2008 RTM is out I have started getting reports of Visual Studio crashing on startup when TestDriven.Net is installed. I was pretty dismayed as TestDriven.Net has included Orcas support since January of this year and this support has been pretty well tested. I certainly wasn’t expecting to see any fatal crashes!

It turns out that this crash only happens when the user has opted not to install the ‘Code Analysis Tools’ feature. This is quite common when someone is doing a minimal install of Visual Studio with just the language feature they need.

The issue appears to be related to the Visual Studio command bars. If you simply query for a command bar that doesn’t exist, Visual Studio will quit with an error (rather than throwing the expected ArgumentException)!

I’m happy to say there are now two possible fixes for the issue:

1. If you go into the Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite setup and enable the ‘Code Analysis Tools’ feature, you should find the crash goes away.
2. I’ve just released TestDriven.Net 2.10, which includes a workaround for this issue. Please read the release notes and download it from here. If you’re using Visual Studio 2008 I strongly encourage you to install this version.

Thanks to Aaron Jensen, Chad Myers and Dru Sellers for reporting the problem.