With more features being pushed down into less expensive versions, Microsoft is always looking for ways to justify the hefty price tag for Visual Studio Enterprise Edition. New for this year, the headline feature is “live unit testing”.
For a while now Visual Studio has had the option to automatically run unit tests after each build. Live Unit Testing takes the next step and runs your tests as you type. You don’t even have to save the file; as soon as you change the code the unit tests start running.
Live code coverage is provided, with indicators for pass/fail/not-tested. An overlay on the icon indicates that the test is being re-run. Clicking on the icon will list the associated tests and the mouse-over will show the stack trace.
VS Live Unit Testing supports NUnit, xUnit, and MSTest, although you’ll need to install preview versions of the latter two.
