Visual Studio 2005: Dude, where are the unit-testing tools?
So all the developers on our team recently got copies of Visual Studio 2005. (Year-end and leftover budget: two great things that go great together.)
The question came up of which edition to get: Architect, Developer, or Tester. The person on our end said, “Get Tester for all the QA people, and Architect for all the developers.” Sounded reasonable to me: in every development environment I’ve ever used, Architect is the edition with all the goodies.
Well, apparently not so with Microsoft these days, as I found when I tried to write some unit tests, using the new unit-testing framework that’s supposed to ship as part of Visual Studio 2005’s Team System thingy, and then did some research to find out why I couldn’t.
Apparently, Microsoft has decided that architects don’t write code. Oh heavens no. Architects don’t need tools for unit testing, or profiling, or code coverage, or static analysis. Apparently, architects just bring the specs down from the mountain, and then goof off until the next release.
In my world, the term “architect” does not mean “doesn’t sully their hands with code”. I can sorta see an architect not needing profiling and code coverage, if they’re on a team of, say, five hundred or more. But an architect would still need unit testing tools because the tests are part of the spec. The spec isn’t complete without acceptance tests that say, “The feature isn’t done until this test passes.”
Complete specs, it appears, are not a concern at Microsoft.
January 8th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
Joe,
I recall hearing about this during the launch event. Microsoft, IMO, dropped the ball on having the multiple packages for VS this time around. It’s very confusing and could be very costly for companies that make mistakes when ordering.
I’m gonna stick with NUnit (and the rest of the open source arsenal that’s out there) along with VS 2005 Standard or Pro.
January 9th, 2006 at 2:17 pm
Microsoft did something similar with Office a few versions back. There was Professional and Small Business Editions. Pro didn’t include Publisher, but Small Business didn’t include Access. Either way you had to buy a missing peice seperately.
They do offer Team Suite, which costs twice as much, and includes all those features in one Visual Studio - The one visual studio to rule them all, so to speak.
January 16th, 2006 at 1:03 pm
Ah– what you wanted was the Team Suite edition, which has everything.