How-To's

dotCover 2.0 Early Access Open

dotCover 1.x is all but history. Starting this week, you can download and play with dotCover 2.0 early builds.

Why would you want to do that? Here’s why:

  • dotCover 2.0 can be installed into 4 versions of Visual Studio, including Visual Studio 11 Beta (with Visual Studio 11 RTM support to follow as soon as it’s available.)
  • dotCover 2.0 bundles a unit test runner. This means, even if a developer doesn’t have ReSharper installed for whatever reason, he/she can still use dotCover for unit test coverage — and of course, for simply running unit tests as well. That said, if dotCover is installed into Visual Studio that also has ReSharper, ReSharper’s implementation of unit test runner is used by default (which you can change at any time.) At this point, dotCover’s own unit test runner supports NUnit and MSTest. If you’re using MSpec or xUnit, you still have to use the ReSharper implementation. However, we’ll be working with plug-in authors to ensure compatibility with dotCover as well.
  • dotCover 2.0 extends filtering capabilities with attribute filters. This enables you to exclude entities marked with certain attributes from coverage analysis. Attribute filters are specified via dotCover | Edit Attribute Filters as fully qualified type names or masks. This could be useful for filtering out test fixtures or obsolete code.

One more feature that is not yet available but is being worked on is the Hot Spots view, which is designed to provide a list of most risky methods in your solution, in terms of high cyclomatic complexity and low unit test coverage. Stay tuned for more details when we’re done with the feature.

Meanwhile, download dotCover 2.0 early builds. If anything goes wrong, please don’t forget to file bug reports in dotCover issue tracker.

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