Some words regarding MSTest

Today I stumbled again about this and feel (once more) a bit frustrated about the current version of MSTest.

In theory Visual Studio VS2008 supports Test-Class-Inheritance. Once you actually start using it, you pretty fast encounter one big limitation:

The test base class must be in the same assembly as the derived test

Mh,  is that such an uncommon scenario that it’s not supported? Personally I don’t think so. What about BDD extensions for MSTest? Do I need to have a Specification-base class in each test assembly? Oh, c’mon ?!

Just when you think it can’t get worse, you realize that

Tests using Test-Class-Inheritance are NOT EXECUTED when running inside a VS TFS 2008 TeamBuild

Awesome :-(

Besides that we also still have the *.vsmdi-hell (Replace * with the name your Solution and a number between 1 and 100 . . .), but that a different story.

If it was my personal decision I would ditch MSTest right away. It’ll be interesting to see whether I’m able to convince our development leads to go down that road . . .

Kick it on dotnet-kicks.de Kick it on DotNetKicks.com
BjRo posted at 2008-8-19 Category: MSTest | Tags: ,

6 Responses Leave a comment

  1. #1Sergey Shishkin @ 2008-8-20 13:04

    +1, let’s review other products and select the optimal one.

  2. #2Rainer Schuster @ 2008-8-20 23:41

    +1, nice IDE-integrated tool. Seems sometimes odd to me. Especially the execution time is n times slower the with the open source ones. Same experience?

    ATM I’m running my Tests with MbUnit and NUnit mixed. The Assert.That and SyntaxHelpers from NUnit. Looking forward NUnits production release of the 2.5 branch with the Assert.Throws addition.

    Also looking forward for Gallio with support for NBehave and the all-in-one Testrunner Icarus …

  3. #3BjRo @ 2008-8-21 17:22

    Same experience :-) . As said this was not the first time I felt unhappy with that tool.

    I’ve worked NUnit, but haven’t looked into MbUnit, NBehave, etc. yet. Is there a particular reason why you’re using both NUnit and MbUnit (besides the NUnit syntax)?

    Regards,
    Björn

  4. #4Rainer Schuster @ 2008-8-27 14:00

    I like the Assert.That Syntax, hope to see also support for Assert.Throws very soon (its planned and will arrive in NUnit 2.5, there is also an extension for 2.4. MbUnit will support it with the release of Gallio and and V3). The assert-helper classes form MbUnit are very powerfull. I recently used XmlAssert to validate a xml return as a string from a WebService I’m providing.

  5. #5addys @ 2009-5-12 00:34

    Hi,

    I’m also stuck with MS-Test, and was wondering if you had made any progress with the problems described in your post.

  6. #6BjRo @ 2009-5-18 22:44

    Nope, not really. Said but true.

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