Working With Visual Studio: A Familiar Environment

As I mentioned in my last post's closing, Test Studio's plugin for Visual Studio lets developers and coding testers work right in an environment they’re familiar and comfortable with. You’ve undoubtedly customized Visual Studio to fit your particular needs: display settings, window behavior and layout, and any number of other plugins and productivity tools such as Telerik’s JustCode.

Working with Test Studio inside of Visual Studio leaves you the ability to pull in other tools easily through NuGet. Do you prefer using NUnit or MbUnit for their powerful Assert and fluent interfaces? Go right ahead! (Note that you can also use outside assemblies easily straight from within Test Studio Standalone, too. You won’t be handicapping other team members using that interface!)

Here’s another example of using a test oracle for validation, this time via NUnit. The example below shows evaluating a downloaded file against a baseline or “truth” file. NUnit’s “Within” clause from its fluent API makes range comparisons simple.

Source control integration for your test suites is a snap from within Visual Studio too. Use the exact same approach you do with your current toolset. Test Studio, ether the Standalone or Visual Studio plugin versions, play nicely with all source control tooling, so you won’t have to alter your habits, teams’ workflows, or worse yet, change your source control system.

Test Studio and Visual Studio: Give it a Try!

Have you avoided Test Studio because you thought a commercial tool would limit your ability to write code to perform customized tasks in your automated suite? Hopefully these last four posts have helped shine some light on that misconception! Why not go grab a trial of Test Studio and give it a try?

More blog posts on the topic of Developer Testing: Working with Visual Studio: Write Code Where Needed & Developers and Functional Testing

About the author

Jim Holmes

Jim Holmes is the Director of Engineering for Test Studio. He has around 25 years IT experience. He's a blogger and the co-author of "Windows Developer Power Tools" and Chief Cat Herder of the CodeMash Conference. Find him as @aJimHolmes on Twitter.

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