It has been some time that agile methodologies, especially test driven development, has been hyped. But if you talk to your friends and colleagues you see “teen sex syndrome” - everybody heard about it, know what it is, would like to do it, but haven't yet ;)

Reasons given vary but most often are “lack of time“ and “complexity of XXX test framework“. Fortunately for all of us, Jamie Cansdale has recently launched TestDriven.NET, Visual Studio .NET (all versions, including beta 2005!) plug-in that seriously simplifies unit testing. It has just right set of features, installs and works flawlessly, and makes test driven development as natural and easy as debugging.

As a matter of fact, it is exactly debugging time that is (in my case, anyway) saved when testing your code with small snippets instead of running the whole thing. I have not yet started coding “test first” but I get a lot more from this than just regression detection - lately I have found several bugs in my code that have been there from the very beginning, it's just that my regular scenarios did not exercise all code paths so I could not see them.

You don't have to use agile methodologies and/or test driven development as described in XP book(s) to enjoy benefits of this add-in - use it to the extent it suites you - highly recommended!

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