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Comment by pmelendez | Hacker News Reader

>" you'll still pay licenses for Windows on the dev boxes and for Visual Studio"

Would you? Wouldn't Visual Studio Express be enough for a lot of cases?

No. It lacks extension support and it also lacks MSTest support. This means no integrated unit testing. This means coding like it's 1996.

Of course, you can run an NUnit runner separately, or as a custom build step, but, well, that sucks.

I use the paid version of Visual Studio and I still avoid MSTest like the plague. I used it for a couple of projects because I thought the integration would be great, but it's awful. It's really slow, even if you use it as a shell for NUnit/xUnit.

I use NUnit/xUnit, and sometimes mspec, and testing from the command line or the N/xUnit GUI is not an issue for me.

FYI, there are even attempts at getting continuous testing working via console, as soon as you save a file in VS the tests are kicked off in the console. I tried it and it "worked", but so far I haven't integrated it into my workflow yet.

I can't speak for Mighty Moose (haven't used it), but NCrunch is pretty awesome. After using it for a few weeks, you feel like you've chopped an arm off when you start using a Visual Studio install without it and have to run tests manually or drop to the command line to run mocha tests.

Completely agree there. Consider using TestDriven.NET, it provides great integration with NUnit. I think it's really the integration that MSTest should've had. The only downside is that it doesn't seem to work with async tests, at least in the versions that I've used.

If you want to sacrifice some productivity then yeah, VS.Express would work.

(i.e. can't run unit-tests inside your IDE for example)

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