The best software to do "x"....

Hi,

Been pulling my team together for a new project, and whilst doing so, have been looking out for software that allows us to do things properly.
Now, before I start, I have to admit, that I absolutely love TFS, and VSTS, and that really makes it difficult to look for something else out there. Being realistic, to keep costs down in the current economic climate, I have been on the look out for cheaper or free alternatives. It seems that they're few and far between these days.

So first of all - non-VSTS unit testing? Well, clearly we're going to want a mocking framework there - that one is easy - Rhino Mocks. I've used NMock, which was great, but I find that once you're used to it, Rhino is the way to go. I tried Moq but found that it was less powerful than Rhino.

Okay, second on the list - code coverage. This one is difficult, Microsoft used to have a product, Coverage Eye which I used on a few occasions, and worked really well. There's NCover - that's quite expensive now, it seems, almost to the point where I should be considering VSTS which seems a lot better. The only alternative I found was partcover - it works, but the experience isn't at all integrated. And that leads me on to another point...

Unit testing framework... Okay, so the integrated MSTest framework is pretty good, and I get why you'd move the test output to a completely different location to where you would normally run from - to run the tests in isolation. No complaints from me there. However, trying to hook code coverage in to that build location from a coverage component that wasn't IDE integrated, and thus could easily capture the test folder location, is a pain. So much so that I'd suggest that using NUnit is unfortunately a necessity. The trouble is that then we're working development from our IDE, and tests from NUnit, which fires up code coverage. Not too bad a solution, but it can be a pain.

Personally, I'd really like to see something more in the professional versions of VS, what I'm saying is that every organisation is not so big it can afford, or wants to afford the all singing all dancing solution, much as I'm sure most would if it was cheaper. I'd love to see either the integration through VS to be brought a little more to the surface to open up the free version use a little better.

As previously mentioned, I love what Microsoft has done with Team System, and TFS, really I do, and I think for corporations that are able to afford it, they will go with that model. I would given the money, no doubts. Though, the alternative at the moment is really not the most compelling - I know, you say, "Save up and buy the proper version then", but at the moment, simply that's not going to happen, which cheapens the experience.

I think that the opening up of the IDE should be a little like love, you don't know that you've got it until you set it free!

And Microsoft, keep up the good work with these tools - for the first time in a long time, they really are impressive!