Agile and Free to Learn Tools in the Dot Net Arena

Agile development and test have finally arrived in the .dotNet programming environment, just as the open source movement has entered into the commercial development of Microsoft and some other top tier software organizations. Typically, dotNet has been solely a development tool with very few quality tools to speak of in any real terms. Quality teams have been almost isolated and collaboration between development and quality assurance are tenuous at best, which is quite the standard in traditional development environments. There is now an opportunity emerging with the launch of Visual Studio 8.0 to a more agile and cooperative team environment.

Development tools for building both desktop and team-based enterprise Web applications are standard for this and many other IDE’s on the market. What this release has to offer is providing the testers the ability to collaborate and fine tune those applications in real and measurable terms. Testers have available to them a complete studio of tools in the Test Edition of Visual Studio 8.0 that are integrated into the development environment including unit, Web, load, manual and code coverage tests. In the past, the use of the Web Application Stress Tool was the only opportunity in this space for configurable load and performance testing of applications. While this tool was effective, it did take a fair amount of expertise in the tool itself as well as load testing in general. This was time consuming and did not lend itself to rapid development and as such, was relegated to the luxury bin and rarely performed well, if at all. Much of the guesswork and pain of learning a new tool is alleviated in a familiar interface and standard toolbars in this tool.

The challenges facing quality assurance in the testing of web based applications has been addressed with the advent of the WebTesting namespace that provides specific classes to enable Web testing. The base class for all web tests is the WebTest class, which is available out-of-the-box as are the classes WebTestRequest and WebTestResponse classes for simulating HTTP requests and responses. Gone are the days of hand coding tests for http responses and posts, this is now a point and click operation with an expert view if you feel so inclined.

Building and testing high-performing desktop applications in a simple team-based design enables swift and high quality applications and deployment of enterprise solutions. Add the ability to communicate and provide to the development team valid and reproducible errors seamlessly and you have the pure divinity of agile. The opportunity to learn the functionality of this tool are available at no cost on the educational portion of the developer network site called channel 8, also known as DreamSpark to students everywhere. You can download the tools below at no cost: Channel 8, DreamSpark, Test Center 90 day Trial Download.