Earlier this month I started on a new project at Schlumberger in Trondheim. One of the first things I do on a new project is getting the development environment up and running. Setting up a source repository, automated builds, testing and deployment and so fourth. We're not using Team System on this project, so for testing we use NUnit. On previous projects I've used the TestDriven.NET VS2005 plug-in with great success. It's basically a plug-in that lets you right click a test project, test class or test case and select run test or debug test. This makes it much easier to run your test than having to depend on the NUnit test console. And if you want to debug your tests you don't have to attach the debugger to the NUnit test console, you can do everything directly from VS2005.

Some time late 2006 TestDriven.NET started charging money for their plug-in. Not a significant amount, but enough to take away some of the sweet taste of the product. Another problem is buying tools like this in large organizations, where there might be political reasons/management directives stating that we use this toolset in our development suite. It's way easier to get away with a free/open source tool than something you have to file an expense report to buy and download.

Thankfully there is an excellent (perhaps even better) alternative to TestDriven.NET for your unit testing needs. JetBrains, the company behind ReSharper and IntelliJ (among many Java developers considered the best IDE available)  have written an excellent VS2005 plug-in called UnitRun which does exactly what TestDriven.NET did. And best of all: it's free! UnitRun is developed by the ReSharper team, and they sure know how to write high quality Visual Studio plug-ins. It looks really good, and the integration is really tight, both in code view, the solution explorer and everywhere else in VS2005.

I've included some screens to give you an idea of what UnitRun has to offer. If you're doing unit testing (off course you do), and don't use VS Team Suite I would strongly recommend downloading UnitRun to make testing a bit more pleasant.

… is now finished (not in beta anymore)! If you're running Windows Vista run, don't walk, over to Microsoft Download Center and grab it. If you haven't installed VS2005 SP1 you need to do that first.

• Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team Suite Service Pack 1
• Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista

In the VS2005 beta and ctp releases the default behavior was that new projects weren’t saved when you created the project. This enabled you to easily create a simple web app or any other VS2005 project, do some testing and discard the files. That way your project folder didn’t get filled up with “Project 1”, “Project 2” and so fourth. Before this functionality came along in VS2005 you would typically use SnippetCompiler to do this kind of “testing”. 

In the final release of VS2005 this isn’t the default behavior, and I’ve been asked a couple of times if Microsoft removed this feature. No, they didn’t. If you go to the Tools – Options – Project and Solutions settings, and uncheck “Save new projects when created” you get this behavior back.

The "Atlas" Control Toolkit is a set of nine great controls and extenders that use "Atlas" technologies and allow developers to easily improve the client experience on their websites.  All of the controls come with full source, and the toolkit also includes Visual Studio 2005 templates to get you started writing your own controls.

You can read more about the Atlas Control Toolkit over at http://atlas.asp.net/default.aspx?tabid=47&subtabid=477 and http://atlas.asp.net/atlastoolkit/.

Edward Bakker wrote a blog post yesterday on the Service BAS, a new project from the Microsoft Pattern & Practices team. So what is Service BAS?

“Service BAT is a toolkit that provides architectural guidance, tools, patterns, wizards, etc. to help you designing and building services using Windows Communication Foundation and ASMX. The Guidance Automation Toolkit is used to integrate all of this very nicely into Visual Studio.NET 2005”

So basically the Service BAT is going to help you build and architect services on the Windows platform. The Visual Studio templates that comes with Service BAT includes items such as “data contract”, “fault contract”, “business entities”, “client” and many more. It looks like Service BAT is going to be a great tool, nicely integrated into Visual Studio 2005, helping you to do stuff like contract first Web Service development.

I definitely need to do some more investigation on the Service BAT as soon as a public version of the toolkit is available. You can read more about the Service BAT over at Edward’s blog, and the code will be made available over at the Service BAT GotDotNet workspace.