This morning I was in a meeting with a bunch of developers and they asked me… “What is the best tool for Unit Testing SharePoint?” I talked to them about patterns and practices SharePoint (Thanks Francis Cheung, your User Group session at Puget Sound SPUG paid off.)
I then went to http://www.SharePointDevWiki.com right in the meeting to look at the list of tools and resources and found a post on SharePoint Development with Unit Testing. They were asking alternatives to WSPBuilder and I knew the spdevwiki had a comparison of solution package development tools including a killer side by side chart of WSPBuilder with STSDev and VSeWSS. The resources were extensive and the name brand resources were great! The people in the meeting had heard of the tools, but were looking for more. Next I went to SharePointReviews.com to see if any third parties had any dev/testing tools, but I didn’t see a development category. The deployment category didn’t fit. Twitter was running through my brain. It prompted me to say let me ask my twitter buddies... (even though my friends in the states were asleep.)
I posted this question to Twitter in the middle of my customer meeting and had 80% of theses responses by the end of the meeting. The customer was super impressed by the quick quality responses.
JoelOleson – @jthake what is the best unit testing tool for SharePoint?
@AndrewWoody @harbars What do you use for Unit Testing SharePoint?
andrewwoody - @joeloleson @harbars either MSTest (built in to VS) or NUnit as framework with Typemock Isolator to mock out SharePoint
mahoekst - @joeloleson Check out: http://www.codeplex.com/spg they have used unit testing in version 2 of the solution (including mocks) very nice.
rmaclean - @joeloleson TFS - white paper on it: http://tinyurl.com/tfssharepoint
zimmergren - @joeloleson @AndrewWoody I use NUnit myself, and the Resharper has some cool testing utilities to help out.
JoelOleson – @AndrewWoody Awesome. It's nice to see TDD coming to SharePoint, but we need more. Experience with Typemock, Isolator?
andrewwoody - @joeloleson yes lots of experience with Typemock Isolator see Unit Testing posts here http://www.21apps.com/agile/
JoelOleson - @zimmergren @AndrewWoody cool. Thanks for sharing. I'm filling in a customers here in Germany with this rich info.
harbars - @joeloleson @AndrewWoody NUnit is my preferred option. DevPartner also good ..., MSTest is good also, lifestyle choice!
What an incredibly rich interactive world wide discussion in the course of an hour… and who knows… it may not be over!
What did I learn:
We also discussed some things I’d learned from twitter from a search on “#MIX09 and SharePoint.”
@katriendg VS2010 will have full debugging and development experience for SharePoint, yeah some people will be happy! #mix09
Blog Resources
Snippet from SPDevwiki on SharePoint Development with Unit Testing (from Top posts) please Contribute! Thanks Jeremy Thake, @spdevwiki the Wiki Rocks!
Microsoft - SharePoint Guidance - Unit Testing
Microsoft has published an article on Unit Testing in SharePoint as part of the SharePoint Guidance Andrew Woodward - 21Apps
Andrew has a great set of articles on Unit Testing in SharePoint Development including 2 excellent White Papers. Francis K. Cheung - Unit Testing SharePoint 2007 Applications
Francis discusses the approaches and also the reasons why SharePoint Unit Testing is so difficult. SPTDD: SharePoint and Test Driven Development, Part One by Eric Shupps Spencer Harbar - "Test Driven" SharePoint Development