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.
Continue »
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.
Continue »
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.
Continue »
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.
Continue »
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.
Continue »
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.
Continue »
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++.
Continue »
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.
Continue »
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.
Continue »
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.
Continue »
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.
Continue »
How to test MFC applications using Visual Assert or cfix