What could be better than perfecting your .NET development with FREE tools?
Even though the tools are FREE, it can take a long time to learn these tools.
The tools we cover are all Open Source and FREE to use for commercial use.
NUNIT - is a unit-testing tool for ALL .NET languages.
The basic concept is that you write your class/methods, then you create a program to stress test them, usually by passing them all types of parameters.
The beauty is that when you change your class/methods, you can verify that your code still works, by regression testing, i.e. running the same tests again.
NUNIT comes with a GUI utility, and you can also get the "Test-Driven" free plug-in to Visual Studio. NUNIT was inspired by JUNIT (for Java), but included everything JUNIT "should have been".
NANT - is typically called a ".NET Build Tool", but I see it as a flexible, no code, scripting utility. It's driven by an XML file that contains dozens of various command-sections, each with various parms. There's also a free GUI you can download, that includes an XML editor, a various menus and a "run" button.
NCover - shows you "Code Coverage", i.e. have you truly tested all branches of your program, and if not, which ones. This works great with NUnit. When you create your unit tests, you should create enough tests to exercise every line of your code. Code Coverage watches your program run, and identifies which lines of code were never executed. We current do not have videos on NCover
We provide 2 hours of training "screen-videos", where you watch Neal use these tools in the .NET VS2003 environment (they will also work in VS2005).
NOTE: Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) has included Microsoft Tools that do the same and more, but again, you can't beat the price of FREE utilities.
|
