When developing Visual Studio add-ins, what testing options are there beyond manual testing?

Question

I'm in the process of developing a Visual Studio add-in for a project at work, and have found debugging and testing it to be pretty tedious. So far, it appears to require the launching of a second instance of Visual Studio and manual execution of the add-in code. What techniques and/or tools are available for automating this sort of add-in testing?

Answer 1

The only way your add-in will be testable is if you design it to be testable. Typcially when writing a Visual Studio Add-In / Package / MEF component I divide my code into 2 projects.

1. Actual Core Engine which has little or no dependency on Visual Studio
2. The actual Add-In which uses the Bridge pattern to expose the core engine

#1 is clearly testable by normal mechanisms and should represent the majority of your code.

#2 is a little more unwieldy to test but not terribly so. Visual Studio's API is entirely interface based and hence can be easily mocked. It takes a bit of leg work but it can certainly be done to enough of an extent to test your code.

Answer 2

There are dedicated single user testing tools out there, like SilkTest and TestPartner, but they tend to be very expensive, so I suggest you check out Automise, which can be used to automate repetitive tasks, and has a 30 day free trial. It comes from the same people who do the excellent FinalBuilder build tool.