There are a ton of questions here on SO regarding NUnit vs. MSTest, and I have read quite a few of them. I think my question here is slightly different enough to post separately.
When I started to use C#, I never even considered looking at MSTest because I was so used to not having it available when I was using C++ previously. I basically forgot all about it. :) So I started with NUnit, and loved it. Tests were very easy to set up, and testing wasn't too painful -- just launch the IDE and run the tests!
As many here have pointed out, NUnit has frequent updates, while MSTest is only updated as often as the IDE. That's not necessarily a problem if you don't need to be on the bleeding edge of TDD (which I'm not), but the problem I was having with frequent updates is keeping all of the systems up-to-date. I use about four or five different PCs daily, and while updating all of them isn't a huge deal, I was hoping for a way to make my code compile properly on systems with an older version of NUnit. Since my project referenced the NUnit install folder, when I upgraded the framework, any computers with the older framework installed would no longer be able to compile my project. I tried to combat the problem by created a common folder in SVN that had just the NUnit DLLs, but even then it would somehow complain about the version number of the binary. Is there a way to get around this issue? This is what made me stop using the first time.
Then one day I remembered MSTest, and decided to give it a try. I loved that it was integrated into the IDE. CTRL-R,CTRL-A, all tests run. How simple! But then I saw that the types of tests available in MSTest were pretty limited. I didn't know how many I'd actually really need, but I figured I should go back to NUnit, and I did.
About now I was starting to have to debug unit tests, and the only way I could figure out how to do it in NUnit was to set NUnit as the startup application, then set breakpoints in my tests. Then in the NUnit GUI, I would run the tests to hit the breakpoints. This was a complete PITA. I then looked at the MSTest GUI again, and saw that I could just click Debug there and it would execute my tests! WOW! Now that was the killer feature that swayed me back in favor of MSTest.
Right now, I'm back using MSTest. Unfortunately, today I started to think about daily builds and did some searching on Tinderbox, which is the only tool I had heard of before for this sort of thing. This then opened up my eyes to other tools like buildbot and TFS. So the problem here is that I think MSTest is guaranteed to lock me into TFS for automated daily builds, or continuous integration, or whatever the buzzword is. My company can't afford to get locked into MS-only solutions (other than VS), so I want to examine other choices.
I'm perfectly fine to go back to NUnit. I'm not thrilled about rewriting 100+ unit tests, but that's the way it goes. However, I'd really love for someone to explain how to squash those two issues of mine, which in summary are:
- how do I setup NUnit and my project so that I don't have to keep upgrading it on every system to make my project build?
- how do I get easier debugging of unit tests? My approach was a pain because I'd have to keep switching between NUnit and the default app to test / run my application. I saw a post here on SO that mentioned NUnitIt on codeplex, but I haven't any experience with it.
UPDATE -- I'm comparing stuff in my development VM, and so far, NUnitit is quite nice. It's easy to install (one click), and I just point it to whatever NUnit binaries are in my SVN externals folder. Not bad! I also went into VS -> Tools -> Options -> Keyboard and changed my mapping for CTRL-R,CTRL-A to map to NUnitit.Connect.DebugGUI. Not perfect since I haven't figured out how to make NUnit automatically run the tests when it's opened, but it's pretty good. And debugging works as it should now!
UPDATE #2 -- I installed TestDriven.Net and gave it a quick run through. Overall, I like it a lot better than NUnitit, but at the moment, NUnitit wins because it's free, and since it also works with NUnit, it will allow me to "upgrade" to TestDriven.Net when the time comes. The thing I like most about TestDriven.Net is that when I double click on the failed test, it takes me right to the line in the test that had failed, while NUnit + NUnitit doesn't seem to be capable of this. Has anyone been able to make this link between the NUnit GUI and the VS IDE happen?