What's lost, what's gained

I didn't download the full version of VS Orcas since 1) heard that installation is quit painful 2) didn't want to make my system unstable and perhaps 3) didn't need all these super-features and wanted to save my RAM from unwanted guests. For now, I'm coding the new version of FreshReports with the new VB Express.

So far, what I really really miss is the Add-Ons. Namely, the ability to run my tests inside the Visual Studio (TestDriven.Net) and the refactoring support by DevExpress. Also, I still haven't used Ankh (a svn itegration addin) and now I'd try it, but I can't.

What is really nice is the Intellisense. I don't see anything else I could use. But then, I didn't try a WPF app yet.

I switched from Adaptev's Zanebug to MbUnit as my testing environment. What I miss is the GUI that allowed to run only a subset of tests (which might be bad), and to automatically run when the assembly is recompiled. What I gained, supposedly, is a very rich test options (however, haven't tried these yet).

(The MbUnit GUI crashed today without any meaningful message after I applied some cool refactoring to my code. Turned out to be stack overflow. I still have to find a framework that survives this thing.)

I switched (for a while) from TypeMock to Rhino Mocks for my mock framework. What I gained is deeper understanding of my design -- how it should be. In addition, I like the method chaining feature (DSL), and of course the explicit method calls instead of strings when I write the expectations. Sort of, instead of writing ExpectCall(myObject, "DoStuff") I just write myObject.DoStuff in the record stage (I should say that TypeMock also can do that -- but in the paid version). Also, the explicit record/playback syntax is cool (however, I'd rename it to something like expect/verify).

What really disappointed me (twice today) is the failure messages. In TDD, I'm expected to understand immediately what's wrong with my code. Here I couldn't see why my argument expectations fail (had to use the undocumented logging feature), and the worse case, an exception thrown in the middle of the test didn't show up as the source of the failure (instead, it told me that my expectations weren't fulfilled).

So, you can see that my (desktop) life is full of changes -- which is always goood!