All Aboard the Test Driven Express

Recently I’ve been following the great store front tutorial for ASP.NET MVC. To begin with it’s actually a tutorial about patterns and the new features of .NET 3.5 such as LINQ to SQL. In this respect it’s a great place to start learning to create .NET web applications. Rob Conery’s brisk but explicit style is excellent and really keeps you interested. I highly suggest any developer watch this series.

What it’s really taught me is how little I really knew about test driven development. The effectiveness of this technique once you learn to use it is really eye openning. It makes me cringe to think of all the semi-tested code that’s got my name on it that’s out in the world. I’m on a drive for self improvement at the moment and I’m really excited to get my hands on new tech like this.

On a side note I’m currently working with Visual Web Developer Express 2008. It’s a fantastic product with one glaring problem. It doesn’t support unit testing from within the IDE. At all. Nil. Nada. Not possible. Apparently, TestDriven.NET used to work but the developer – Jamie Cansdale, was forced by Microsoft to remove the support under a catch all clause in the EULA. This is quite old news but I’ve only just become aware of it due to my current experiments with the Visual Web Developer Express.

As an owner of Visual Studio 2008 who doesn’t currently have the disc to hand it’s pretty annoying having to stick with the NUnit GUI and this also means I can’t debug my tests. I understand Microsoft needs to protect their business but the supposed market for the Express products is beginning developers and by removing Unit Testing support they are forcing their users into bad habits.

I’ll make do because I can, but come on Microsoft! Sort it out!