Share via

Wanted: A plugin for Visual Studio to make TDD easier

  • Article

I thought I'd put a post about this on my blog so that I could point people to this rather than having to describe this rather niche problem again and again.

I like Test Driven Development (TDD), but I don't like the fragmented mental state I end up in when doing TDD. When I am writing a test (using NUnit), it would be great if my development tool could automatically create empty implementations of the classes and methods I am testing though simple 'right-click to implement unknown class/method/property' functionality. This would save me from having to go create the as-yet-unknown classes and methods by hand, and let me concentrate on writing my tests.

When I describe this potential functionality to people they usually respond with confused look that seems to say 'that is the weirdest idea I have heard in quite a while', but it isn't as niche as you may think since IntelliJ Idea and Eclipse have this functionality - check out "Generating methods, constants, parameters from unknown usages".

My hopes of getting a tool that can fill this need were raised recently when I read on Luke Hutteman's blog that the company that makes IntelliJ Idea, JetBrains, has just started the early access program for a plugin for Visual Studio called Resharper. I posted a question to the resharper.eap newsgroup, and hopefully I'll get an answer on the 'is this functionality going to be in Resharper?' question soon.

I was thinking that maybe I could create this tool myself, but I'd hate to just 're-invent the wheel' so I want to make sure that it doesn't already exist.

If you know of such a tool, I'd love to hear from you...

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2004
    hmm.. I like this. Let us know how your search turns out.
  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2004
    That's embarassing, but yes, my link was incorrect.
  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2004
    I just heard back from JetBrains. Excellent news... this functionality will be in Resharper!
    I'm now waiting to hear from them about when we might expect to see it.

    - Chris
  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2004
    I believe the words you are looking for are "Intention Actions".
  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2004
    Thanks Marty!
    I did a search on Google and found a good description here: http://www.sdtimes.com/cols/firstlook_072.htm
  • Anonymous
    April 16, 2004
    My company has a unit test framework which integrates into VisualStudio. It is an asset normally provided free to our clients but can be acquired through licensing agreements if needed. Check out http://www.avanade.com/.