David Patton presents Agile .NET to an XP audience
David Patton gave a presentation at the Washington DC XP User Group on Monday night. It was different to the typical XP/TDD presentation due to the audience (who needed no introduction to TDD!) and also David's experiences. It was interesting to hear the audience's surprise at the maturity of the tools for Agile development on the Microsoft platform and also to hear the comparisons to tools on other development platforms.
Some of the things that drew gasps from the audience:
- Using NUnit attributes to label test fixtures and test cases freeing you from naming conventions or inheritance to define tests. (Example: jUnit requires TestFixtures to derive from TestCase and test cases to be prefixed with "test")
- [Ignore] attribute to ignore a currently failing test while giving some legitimate reason to explain, then seeing NUnit show this as an ignored test. (Example: Many developers on other platforms would just prefix the test case with an underscore to have it ignored and then might forget about the test)
- [TestFixtureSetUp] attribute enabling setup code to be executed once for a whole fixture. Apparently this is an often desired feature missing from other platforms.
What do you like or dislike about the agile tools on the .NET platform versus other development platforms?