Developer News

You don’t have to be easily offended to be an iPhone app approver, but it helps
Someone at Apple really does need to take a closer look at how they choose the people who work as iPhone application approvers, either that or take a chainsaw to the approval process guidelines and start again but when sober this time. Look, much has been written about the madness that is iPhone app approval. Remember the fuss about a bouncing Barack Obama or the South Park application which were banned in case they offended anyone, for example? While these examples are enough to make you wonder if the app testers jump and scream when confronted by their own shadow, the strange case of…

prevent user from going back or disable submit
i have a form being filled. i don’t want the user to be able to submit twice. how can i either prevent the user from going back or disable the submit button? i am currently disabling the submit button but when the user clicks back(from the next page) it asks whether it should resend data. when the…

Silverlight NUnit Projects

I’ve been doing some experiments to find out if it’s possible to execute NUnit on a Silverlight project. I knew that Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend both host Silverlight for use in the designer window. It turns out that rather than host a separate instance of the CoreCLR, the designer simply loads the Silverlight assemblies into the host runtime. This simplifies the business of creating a compatible unit testing framework considerably!

With a little bit twiddling, I’ve managed to tweak the ‘nunit.framework’ assembly so that it’s compatible with Silverlight projects. In order for your tests to execute successfully, you also need to ensure that all Silverlight assemblies (except ‘mscorlib’) are set to ‘Copy Local: True’. After this is done you can run, debug and even do code coverage on your Silverlight unit tests!

Because creating one of these projects is a fiddle to set up, I’ve created Silverlight NUnit Project template that does the work for you. To install the template simply open the ‘SilverlightNUnitProject.vsi’ file and ignore the unsigned content warning. Once installed, you will find it under the ‘Visual C# / Silverlight’ section of the ‘New Project’ dialog. You can download the template from here.

To execute one or more unit tests you should use ‘Run Test(s)’ rather than ‘Test With > Silverlight’.

In summary you now have 3 options when testing Silverlight projects.

1. For unit testing you can create a Silverlight NUnit Project and use the usual TestDriven.Net commands.
2. For integration testing (within the context of a browser) you can use the Silverlight Testing Framework.
3. For spelunking individual methods inside the CoreCLR you can use ‘Test With > Silverlight‘.

I’d be interested to hear how you get on.

TestDriven.Net 2.19: Release Notes

Which Test Runner?

The latest version of TestDriven.Net will display the name of the test runner used in the test results summary. If the target project doesn t reference a known test framework assembly, TestDriven.Net will use the Ad hoc test runner to quickly execute the target method.

You can see the above method has been executed using the Ad hoc test runner. If this happens when targeting real unit test, the chances are a test runner to handle the target test type or version hasn t been registered.

NUnit 2.5 Beta 2 Support

This version includes support for NUnit 2.5 Beta 2. The previous version had a bug that caused tests that threw an exception to show as skipped rather than failed.

Test With > .NET 1.1 on a 64-bit OS

If the .NET 1.1 SDK is installed and you re using Visual Studio 2005, you will have the option to Test With > .NET 1.1 . Under the covers this functionality builds your project using MSBee before executing your tests using .NET 1.1. This will now work when executed on a 64-bit OS.

I d be interested to hear if there s any demand for this feature on Visual Studio 2008.

Visual Studio 2003 Support

This version once again works on Visual Studio 2003. Only one person noticed this was broken on the previous beta. Are there many projects still being developed using Visual Studio 2003? I m using MSBee for all my legacy .NET 1.1 support.

Running xUnit tests on a 64-bit OS

Some people have been experiencing problems registering the xUnit test runner on a 64-bit OS. It turns out the problem was due to xUnit sometimes registering itself under HKLM and sometimes under HKCU depending on what was previously installed. If you re experiencing this problem, try re-registering xUnit (using xunit.installer.exe) after installing this version.

Clear Error List Before Build

Failed tests will now be removed from the error list when a new build starts. This prevents failed tests from becoming mixed up with build errors. I think this is the correct default behavior.

Download

You can find the release notes here and download here.