Expect Beta 5

Another new Beta of Expect is available on Codeplex. The main goal for this version was to improve the tooling in Visual Studio. Unfortunately, some of the programming model have changed between VS2008 and VS2010, and I have time to develop all features twice. Consequently, the IDE improvements are only for VS 2010.

This screen capture illustrate two major elements of this new Beta : Smart-tags and Error squiggles.

You could now use smart tags to trigger actions on Expect elements. Smart-tags are the small rectangles that you see at the beginning of an element in VS. You could expand them by clicking on this small rectangle or using the shortcut Ctrl + ‘.’

Error squiggles are the “wavy” red lines that VS use to show you that something is wrong. In Expect, it means that the fixture is not resolved yet.

Hopefully, there are some features that you will be able to use also in VS2008.

For example, you could now combine setupfrom and setup instructions. It is possible that this new features make your VS project not compiling. In this case, you will just have to run the custom tool used by Expect to generate the unit test. You could do this by saving your Expect files, or right click on them in solution explorer and click on “Run custom tool”.

Another small feature is the ability to list the styles in your document template file. It makes it a lot easier to setup your documentation generation. To use this, right click on your Expect project. If your configuration file contains report information, you should have the following menus:

By clicking on ‘”List template’s styles”, Expect will write the list of styles in the Output window of Visual Studio

The list contains the inner name and id of each styles for paragraphs and tables. You could use either name or id in Expect report section in the configuration file.

Another change in the documents are the rendering of ObjectFeedFixture. They are now rendered as tables in the document. ObjectFeedFixture was introduced in Beta 4 and allow to set properties for an object in the context.

I will post very soon a walkthrough for document generation but in the meantime you could look at Expect samples and documentation.

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