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.