Automated testing of GUI applications is tricky. It is not only tricky because testing the GUI itself is hard (despite there being good tools around), it is also tricky because GUI applications often tend to be a bit hostile towards unit testing.
One class of GUI applications for which this kind of hostility often applies is MFC applications. Although MFC allows the use of DLLs, components, etc, the framework still encourages the use of relatively monolithic architectures.
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Slightly delayed, Visual Assert 1.1 beta is now available for download. As announced in a previous post, the most important change in the new version is added suport for the latest version of Visual Studio, Visual Studio 2010.
However, the new version also brings a couple of new features that apply to all versions of Visual Studio. Most importantly, cfix and Visual Assert now expose an API that allows developers to plug in custom event sinks.
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Now that Visual Studio 2010 has oficially been released, I keep getting questions about a Visual Studio 2010-enabled version of Visual Assert.
The fact that Visual Studio 2010 is already out, yet there is no Visual Assert version for it is unfortunate. It would have been nice to have Visual Studio 2010 support ready on Visual Studio’s release date, however, that was not possible due to lack of time. Having solved most compatibilty issues though (of which there were many, Visual Studio 2010 is a truly painful release for AddIn developers), I am now confident to be able to offer a first beta by begin of May.
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Visual Assert, the unit testing Add-In for Visual Studio/Visual C++ has finally left its beta status and – better yet – is now available for free, both for commercial and non-commercial use. Visual Assert, based on the cfix 1.6 unit testing framework, allows you to easily write, manage, run, and debug your C/C++ unit tests -– without ever leaving the Visual Studio® IDE. No fiddling with command line tools, no complex configuration, and no boilerplate code required.
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A new release of cfix, the unit testing framework for C and C++, is now available for download. Besides some minor enhancements like extending the maximum permitted fixture name, cfix 1.6 introduces a major new feature, Anonymous Thread Auto-Registration.
Since its very first release, cfix has supported multi-threaded test cases, i.e. test cases that spawn child threads, each of which potentially making use of the various assertion statements like CFIX_ASSERT. To make this work and ensure that failing assertions are handled properly, however, usage of CfixCreateThread (rather than the native Win32 CreateThread) was mandatory when spawning such threads.
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One of the features introduced back in cfix 1.2 was the ability to customize test execution with the command line parameters -fsr and -fsf. Using these switches can make your test runs more effective and can help simplify debugging – so it is worth spending a minute on this topic.
Assume our test run comprises two fixtures, Fixture A and Fixture B. As fixtures are always run in alphabetic order, and tests run in the order they are defined, the first test to be executed is Test 1 of Fixture A, followed by Test 2 of Fixture A, and so on.
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Along with JUnit, JWebUnit, NUnit, and SimpleTest, cfix was one of the nominees for the Automated Testing Institute’s Automation Honors Award 2009 in the category Best Open Source Unit Automated Test Tool. A few days ago, the results were published and cfix finished second – surpassed only by JUnit, which finished 1st (No real surprise here). If you are interested, there is a video in which the results are presented.
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A third beta release of Visual Assert is now available for download on www.visualassert.com.
Visual Assert, in case you have not tried it yet, is an Add-In for Visual Studio that adds unit testing capabilities to the Visual C++ IDE: Based on the cfix unit testing framework, Visual Assert allows unit tests to be written, run, and debugged from within the IDE. Pretty much like Junit/Eclipse, TestDriven.Net or MSTest, but for real, native code – code written in C or C++.
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A new version of cfix, the unit testing framework for C and C++ on Windows, is now available on Sourceforge. Despite fixing several minor issues, the new version resolves the following two issues that were reported by users:
Definiting multiple WinUnit fixtures with setup/teardown routines in a single .cpp file leads to a compilation error A thread handle is leaked during execution of a test (#2889511) Updated binaries and source code are available for download on Sourceforge.
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The Beta 2 release of Visual Assert (formerly named cfix studio) is now available for download. The release marks a major step in the development of Visual Assert for that it not only comprises a number of bugfixes but also introduces major new features. The two most important certainly are support for EXE targets and Wizard assistance.
Support for EXE Targets As announced in a previous post and also discussed in the post about the cfix 1.
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A new version of the cfix unit testing framework is now ready for download.
Unlike the previous release, which was mainly a maintenance release, cfix 1.5 adds major new features: kernel mode multithreading and EXE-based unit tests.
EXE based unit tests As I discussed in a previous post in the context of Visual Assert/cfix studio, cfix’ restriction to DLL based unit tests has turned out to be quite a limitation for certain kinds of projects.
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Back when I began thinking about creating a Visual Studio Add-In for cfix, I needed a code name for the project. After tentatively using the name cfix+ for a while, I quickly settled on cfix studio – given that the project revolved around cfix and Visual Studio, this name pretty much suggested itself.
Soon after going into Beta, however, I had to realize that this name was not without its problems.
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The Automated Testing Institute has elected cfix to be one of the finalists for the Autmation Honors award. The winners of the award will be highlighted in a Special December Edition of the Automated Software Testing Magazine.
If you are a cfix user, be sure to vote for cfix here.
And by the way, I think The Grinder, which is a really neat web performance testing framework, also deserves being voted for…
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N.B. cfix studio was the code name of what has become Visual Assert
The biggest shortcoming of the current cfix studio version certainly is that it requires all tests be implemented in a DLL. Conceptually, keeping test cases separated from the remaining code certainly is a good idea – and implementing tests in a DLL is a way to accomplish this. However, there are many projects in which such separation is either not feasible or just too much effort.
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N.B. cfix studio was the code name of what has become Visual Assert
There is little doubt that native code, and C and C++ in particular, is here to stay. And still, it is pretty obvious that when it comes to tools and IDEs, it is the managed world that has gotten most attention from tool vendors over the past years.
While there are lots and lots of useful tools for native development, many of them probably even better than their managed counterparts, there are some areas where the managed language fraction is far ahead: One of these areas certainly is IDE support for unit testing.
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Today, a new version of cfix, the open source unit testing framework for user and kernel mode C and C++, has been released. cfix 1.4, in addition to the existing feature of allowing test runs to be restricted to specific fixtures, now also allows single testcases to be run in isolation, which can be a great aid in debugging. Besides several minor fixes, the cfix API has been slightly enhanced and cfix now degrades more gracefully in case of dbghelp-issues.
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cfix 1.3, the latest version of the unit testing framework for C/C++ on Windows, has just been released. As announced in the last blog post, the major new feature of this release is WinUnit compatibility, i.e. the ability to recompile existing WinUnit test suites into cfix test suites without having to change a single line of code.
To demonstrate that this compatibility indeed works, consider the following simple example:
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The cfix 1.2 package as released last week contained a rather stupid bug that the new build, 1.2.0.3244, now fixes: the amd64 binaries cfix64.exe and cfixkr64.sys were wrongly installed as cfix32.exe and cfixkr32.sys, respectively. Not only did this stand in contrast to what the documenation stated, it also resulted in cfix being unable to load the cfixkr driver on AMD64 platforms.
The new MSI package is now available for download on Sourceforge.
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cfix 1.2, which has been released today, introduces a number of new features, the most prominent being improved support for C++ and additional execution options.
New C++ API To date, cfix has primarily focussed on C as the programming language to write unit tests in. Although C++ has always been supported, cfix has not made use of the additional capabilities C++ provides. With version 1.2, cfix makes C++ a first class citizen and introduces an additional API that leverages the benefits of C++ and allows writing test cases in a more convenient manner.
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As discussed last week, cfix 1.1.0 has suffered from a potential deadlocking issue when run in the VisualStudio 2008 debugger. cfix 1.1.1 mitigates this problem and should now work equally well with Visual Studio 2005 and 2008.
When run in a debugger, cfix now will not try to capture a stack trace for a failed assertion any more. These stack traces usually have been redundant to what the debugger provides, yet the logic to implement this has been the reason for the interference with the VS 2008 debugger.
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How to test MFC applications using Visual Assert or cfix