and before I knew it, I am in Oklahoma!
Visual Studio Team System is really cool. I have enjoyed playing with it and am ready
to test infect a few neighbors this week I am not fully convinced at the features for the
architects (but that has more to do with me not being convinced about the architects in the
first place!). However, the tools for developers and testers are simply great.
You may ask, "but doesn?t VSTS do what NUnit has already done." Yes and no.
NUnit gave us the facility to do unit testing. Unfortunately, the adoption of NUnit for .NET
has been much lower than the adoption of JUnit for Java. What Microsoft has done with
VSTS is, so to say, put candy on the table.
What do I mean by ?candy on the table?? When you attend a conference or a show, you
generally find candy on the table, and often you tend to toss a few in. You would not eat
that many candies if it were in a distant table or in another room. When you can reach for
the candy with no effort, you tend to have a lot more of those.
Unit testing is the candy in development. It was kept in that distant jar of NUnit so far.
I am hoping by bringing it to the table, VSTS will promote the acceptance of Unit Testing
among .NET developers. What do you think?
Of course, VSTS is more than Unit Testing. I really like the Code Coverage feature. Imagine,
as a team lead, you can not only ask your team to use Unit Testing, but also enforce a certain
level of code coverage in different components of your choice. It also brings code analysis (what
was available as a separate download ? FxCop) to the table as well.
The web testing and load testing features integrated into studio is nice.
Finally, ability to manage the project within studio is what it is all about. You had to use different
tools to be agile. Now all of that is folded into studio and Team Foundation Server. MSF Agile
really hopes to make the .NET developer community agile. Now we have little excuse not to be agile
[except for the price, but that?s our boss?s problem, isn?t it ;) ]
