In addition to changing our name to Cenqua (see Matt’s Blog for more details), we have released a beta for Clover.NET. The beta includes command line tools, a Visual Studio 2003 plugin and NAnt tasks for both version 0.84 and the current CVS version (0.85).
We’ve learnt a few lessons along the way with this development. We now know how to perform long running operations in Visual Studio. It may sound easy but operating on a separate thread in Visual Studio can give you strange results. No doubt there is an apartment threading issue at play but I think only God and Don Box understand the concepts at play there (and I think even God isn’t sure about it).
Personally I’ve been interested to see the contrasts between my experience in Ant and how things work in NAnt. The use of .NET metadata is cool but can also be restrictive. More on this in another post.
Another contrast is of course the difference between C# and Java development. There isn’t much there, IMHO. On the plus side, some things in C# are nice such as delegates for function pointers, enums and the general level of syntactic sugar. On the other hand some things are more primitive than Java. The runtime library seems strangely incomplete, such as, for example, not having a Set interface in the Collections namespace. I’m not sure why we don’t have the same level of capability as the original STL in C++ in both Java and C#. Overal much of a muchness for me.
We’ve put up a sample report for NUnit on the new website. Ideally we’d like to add a few more open source C# projects as nice examples but frankly it’s hard to find open source C# projects with good unit test suites. Any recommendations would be welcome. As with Clover, Clover.NET will be free to open source projects.