I figured this was some spam... I've never heard of
AdapDev and they bcc'd my email address. Further, I got
two emails from the same "Sean
McCormack" with different info in each.
These got zapped from my email... interested to hear
what you find out.
Ouch. Don't like hearing my name and spam in the same
paragraph. To clarify, the only people that would have
received an email from me are those that downloaded a
beta version of Codus (an ORM tool) from my site (they
had to provide their email), or registered for my
announcements newsletter (also had to provide their
email). That's it. Rich, is it possible that you
downloaded a beta version of Codus from my website?
Duly noted, Sean, and I'm sure that's how I got on the
list. Generally, when I get emails without a valid 'to'
address, I will find them suspect if I don't know the
sender.
I really appreciate your attentiveness to this, Sean. I
apologize for disparaging your name :-). I'll be much
more likely to look at the tools now!
Well, more power to these guys, although we would have
loved to have them help with some of the same features
on NUnit. There roadmap and wish list looks a lot like
ours.
One comment on their rationale for not doing so:
"Initially, this was the goal. However, several
of the key features in Zanebug - such as test iterations
- would have required a complete rewrite of the
underlying NUnit engine."
That's not really so, but I'd guess an honest mistake.
Lot's of people assume there's an
"engine" that runs the tests. Of
course there is a test runner, but actuallye of each
different type of test runs itself. That's how we
support plugin attributes for test extensions, running
csunit tests, etc.
A lot of what is being done in reporting is also
available for NUnit but it's not bundled and not
advertised very strongly - or at all - I tell people
about it when they have a problem.
Maybe we should put them all someplace.
I do think these folks could have found some better way
to describe their system than calling it
"professional" as compared to NUnit.
There's a lot of professional experience in the NUnit
team - that's what led me to choose it in the first
place. Maybe it's just market-speak.
I'd also like to know what the licensing means about
non-commercial versus commercial use. It could be a
pretty serious limitation. Until it's clearer, I dont'
feel I can look at the source, so long as I'm working on
NUnit.
Charlie
Charlie,
Thanks for the comments. You covered a lot of ground,
but I'll try to keep up. :)
First and foremost, I think NUnit is an excellent tool,
and the use of "professional"
shouldn't be interpreted in any way as a strike against
NUnit or the people in the project. The term
"professional" was in reference to the
Zanebug UI, which in our opinion provides more
information and options than the current NUnit GUI.
Perhaps "enhanced" would have been a
better term. NUnit remains the leading test unit, and
the strides we made with Zanebug wouldn't have been
possible without modelling from NUnit. I think there's
recognition throughout the development community of
NUnit's place in TDD, and the achievements of its
authors (and professionalism ;). Likewise, we realized
Zanebug wouldn't provide much value w/o support for
NUnit, which is further testament to the success of your
project. So, please don't misinterpret it.
We actually attempted to start with NUnit and enhance
it. Likewise, we looked at MbUnit and Marc Clifton's AUT
- all good frameworks. However, in each case, the
changes that would have been required for our purposes
would have been significant from our perspective. We
deemed it easier (right or wrong) to just start writing
our own. This was also invaluable for us just because of
the experience it provided with multiple aspects of the
framework (remoting, reflection, attributes, threading,
forms, etc.). I don't discount that NUnit could or does
provide the same features - especially given the more
recent releases...but at the time it either wasn't
apparent, appeared to require too much work w/o guarante
off our changes being included, or our personal goals
and aspirations outweighed it. At it's core, I really
consider Zanebug just to be an extension to NUnit, with
an enhanced GUI. The result is a project that builds on
your work - and doesn't discourage its usage - but at
the same time allows us to enhance and extend according
to our own goals and timeline.
Lastly, I apologize for the confusion - there is no dual
licensing model (non-commercial vs commercial). The
entire tool, and code, is licensed freely under the
Apache License 2.0, which states you can use it for any
purpose. The only underlying requirement is that the
copyright info and any changes be kept in all original
code - same as the NUnit requirements. I'll make sure
that the FAQ is updated to clarify this issue. Please
feel free to look at the code - it's provided free and
open-source, in the same spirit as NUnit.