Visual Studio's testing tools compared to third-party tools

Question

How do Visual Studio's testing tools compare to third-party frameworks like NUnit? Are there any significant differences?

Answer 1

Consider Unit Test, No, and I believe some people on NUnit team went to MS to implement MS UnitTEST feature.

But Test edition has a lot of other features such as Web Testing and Load Testing.

Answer 2

MS unit testing framework has better integration (even if you use Testdrven.NET) but it take mire time to load, has some strange issues when it forgets to update the test list and only run as a 32bit process. MS has coverage tool integrated as well.

I guess that choosing the correct tool mostly depends on your project and your team.

Answer 3

The unit test tools, and all of the other test tools in Visual Studio Team System Test Edition also integrate well with Team Foundation Server. I don't refer to source control, but to the fact that they integrate with work items and with Team Build. In particular, statistics are kept on test successes and failures, and there are some nice canned reports that Managers might like to look at daily to see how testing has been doing.

Answer 4

For me MsTest (comparing to MBUnit, NUnit and XUnit.net) is sufficient in terms of features.

The integrated runner is Ok, it works faster than Resharper's runner and produces better output (IMHO), however, left-clicking on unit test item in the runner gets you to the output instead of the unit-test source, which is very non-intuitive and annoying.

My biggest problem with MsTest currently is that it drops all binaries and other deployment items for the test session into a single folder. This is really bad if you have multiple test projects in your solutions with, say a different Spring.Config in each project.

--UPDATE--

A year after I wrote this answer, I'm convinced MsTest is NOT the way to go, not for new projects. The biggest problem with it is lack of support for inheritance for the Test classes' TestInitialize methods. Plus, MsTest requires you to have Visual Studio installed on the build server!