Will VS 2005 "Kill" NUnit?
One of the great things to happen to software development over recent years is the availability of free open source dev tools, such as NUnit, NDoc, and NAnt. They've made certain dev tasks easier, and opened many people's eyes to the importance of automated builds and unit testing.
Yet the next release of Visual Studio threatens to make some of these tools redundant; if you can create unit tests and automate builds from within the IDE, why would you bother with the open source tools?
I'm torn on this one; I think it's great that VS will provide these features (the open source tools are often tricky to use because of their open source nature: little documentation, problems building the source, etc), but in many ways I hope this doesn't kill off the tools (or the spirit in which they were developed) completely.
In a way, we can thank these tools for providing MS with a kick in the right direction; if NAnt and NUnit never existed, would MS have put these features into VS 2005?
posted by Adam Young @ 10:31 am
1 comments
1 Comments:
Like you I can't decide whether it's a good or a bad thing.
Good Thing - It'll be great to have fully integrated unit testing and automated bulding tools; a great looking visual interface rather than command lines and parameters etc.
Bad Thing - If MS kill off the open source tools with VS 2005 will they continue to innovate and extend in this area (as open source developments do)?
It may all depend on how deep rooted the use of the open source tools in the .Net arena is and how the open source developers continue to move their developments on. If we look at other open source developments that have had big software companies move into their arena we can see that armies of Java development teams were using Log4J before Sun tried to muscle it out by providing a cut down version of api in Java 1.4, needless to say that the Log4J continues to innovate and thrive.
Wor
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