We released xUnit.net 1.0 RTM today.
Acknowledgements
Many people have helped us get to our 1.0 release.
First, we want to acknowledge the inventors of the core ideas behind xUnit frameworks, especially Kent Beck and Eric Gamma, without whom we probably wouldn't have anything to talk about today. :)
Second, we want to thank the people who hatched the idea of a new framework with us, including Peter Provost, Brian Button, Scott Densmore, Jonathan Wanagel, Jamie Cansdale, and Drew Miller.
Lastly, our community provided significant feedback to us during the development process by providing feedback on the web site, opening feature requests, reporting bugs, and generally helping guide the design of the framework. We especially want to thank Matt Podwysocki, Ben Hall, Harry Pierson, Scott Hanselman, Kirk Viehland, Daniel Cazzulino, Oren Eini, Jeff Brown, and Charlie Poole.
Looking Back
We release Beta 1 of our framework September 19, 2007, almost exactly 7 months ago. It took a lot longer than we thought it would to get to 1.0, especially given that we had been using the framework extensively internally for a while before that.
Our original release plans called for just a console runner, but our users quickly educated us on the value of variety. We personally are TestDriven.net users, so that became our second runner; our community quickly followed on asking us to support ReSharper and to write a stand-alone GUI runner. Our time spent with the console runner in an automated environment then drove us to write an MSBuild task which provides much better feedback on the testing process.
Extensibility was a very important feature for us. We felt that there was a lot to be desired in the landscape of extensibility for test frameworks. An important early decision we made was to push as much of our "functionality" as we possibly could out into extensions so that we were forced to exercise and improve our extensibility points.
Another unexpected issue was around test runners and their tight coupling to the version of xUnit.net that they were built against. We made a decision to push out the 1.0 release in order to better support the idea of having test runners that were independent from any specific version of xUnit.net. We succeeded for all of our runners, save the ReSharper runner, for reasons we've already documented.
Looking Forward
Our near-term focus is going to be on refining the process of actually using the framework for Test Driven Development, especially in conjunction with Visual Studio. While tools like TestDriven.net provide a lower friction environment than others, we still believe that there is room for improvement in the day to day usage for TDD.
A lot of this work will be centered around the GUI runner. What we released in 1.0 is essentially a bare-bones runner that we labeled experimental. While we would like to know if you have issues with the runner, please be aware that we are intended to make dramatic changes to it to help support our idea of zero-friction TDD.
It is our intention, therefore, to release interim drops of the GUI runner as we make progress, hopefully on a fairly regular schedule.
Additionally, there are several releases on the horizon (especially ReSharper 4.0 and ASP.NET MVC) which will likely also result in new point releases of the framework.
For the longer term (version 2.0), what we really want now is to let the framework get greater adoption so that many more users can help provide feedback on the things they love and the things they don't, the things that just work and the things that could be tweaked. If you download and use 1.0, please visit our forums and tell us about your experiences!
