The Outercurve Foundation today announced that xUnit.net, a popular unit-testing tool for .NET, is the latest addition to its growing ASP.NET gallery. xUnit.net delivers an extensible, free and open source framework to make test-driven development more manageable for enterprise agile developers who are using the .NET platform.
The xUnit.net project provides unit testing for C#, F#, VB.NET and other .NET languages. Originally created in 2007, the project was immediately successful with developers due to its strong feature alignment with the .NET Framework, with each release receiving thousands of downloads. Project leaders Jim Newkirk (the open source veteran who built the NUnit framework) and Brad Wilson were both original members of Microsoft ‘s CodePlex team, and are excited about xUnit.net’s future prospects under the Outercurve Foundation’s governance.
“Developers are fond of xUnit.net for test-driven development because it was designed by expert agile practitioners for practitioners,” said Brad Wilson, principal software developer at Tier 3 and co-creator of xUnit.net. “Moving xUnit.net to Outercurve and allowing outside code contribution allows us to bring even greater community expertise together and accelerate innovative advancements in the tool. Jim and I are looking forward to these contributions playing an important role in the upcoming 2.0 release.”
The Outercurve Foundation offers IP governance and neutrality to accelerate the success of open source projects. Microsoft has assigned its copyrights to the foundation, making it easy for the xUnit.net project leaders to accept code contributions and polls from the community. xUnit.net’s admittance into Outercurve also clears the way for a major new update release and distribution via the Foundation’s NuGet package updating system.
The xUnit.net 2.0 milestone will take advantage of the capabilities found in .NET 4.5, including asynchronous tests and testing in parallel. These features will save time, allow developers greater flexibility in scheduling testing, and simplify the testing process by running multiple components and subcomponents on the same hardware simultaneously. Its release will add further momentum to Outercurve’s ASP.NET gallery.
“xUnit.net is the 11th project in Outercurve’s ASP.NET gallery. The gallery has experienced a remarkable increase in contributors since its inception, garnering over 12M downloads across all projects,” said Outercurve Foundation executive director Paula Hunter. “Gallery projects including NuGet, CronoZoom and Orchard are establishing a new wave of successful open source technologies on the .NET platform. We look forward to deploying the resources of our dedicated staff to ensure the healthy growth of xUnit.net’s community and project vitality going forward.”
The ASP.NET Open Source Gallery’s mission is to support ASP.NET open source projects and develop features of ASP.NET with greater community involvement. The gallery is a collaborative environment for ASP.NET open source projects and passionate developers who want to solve problems with innovative solutions.
