Introduction into Testing Your .NET 3.5 Applications

Testing applications has often been an after-thought when building applications. But now many leading software companies build unit tests and are building applications using test-driven development. While these are not new ideas, this month's Visual Studio Magazine includes a step-by-step guide on how you can take advantage of the tools built into Visual Studio 2008 to automate testing your application.

The article, entitied Test Your .NET 3.5 Apps, shows how to build your first test in both C# and Visual Basic, including how to configure the test and run it inside Visual Studio. Next, the authors create a sample application and show how to implement user interface tests. Finally, the article discusses testing for the real world.

Building unit tests, running tests, viewing test results features are available in Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition. Additoinal features for building generic tests and load modeling are part of Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition. For a product comparison, see Visual Studio 2008 Product Comparison.

You can try out Visual Studio with 90-day trial editions or preinstalled on a virtual machine. For more details, see Try Visual Studio 2008.