Re: Fwd: Addin SetUp question

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 2:36 PM, Charlie Poole
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Kelly,
>  >  >  I'm thinking of allowing all tests to have children and
>  > >  dropping TestCase from the hierarchy. A new TestCase  >
>  > class would be used as a child of a TestMethod and would  >
>  > represent the execution of the method with one set of  >  arguments.
>  >  >
>  >  >  Comments?
>  >
>  >  My only comment is that the entire hierarchy is kind of
>  > under-documented, which makes it difficult to come up to
>  > speed on  things and make intelligent comments... ;-)
>
>  Well, it is internal... but OTOH I did ask for comments. :-)

As you know, I'm not shy about making them either... ;-)

>  Then again, this list does include people who work with NUnit
>  internals, so I'm glad I asked.

The thing that makes Eclipse so wonderful is the plethora of
well-documented extension points. That gives many mere mortals the
opportunity to create extension points. The whole platform benefits
quickly from that. That's in stark contrast to the difficulty with
which one can extend the Linux core, for example. Slower benefits are
realized there. As we move towards NUnit v 3.0, I hope that we will
keep the "well-documented" part in mind, because extensibility is, in
my mind, a key differentiator for 3.0...  I intend on putting my
keyboard where my mouth is on that too.

I'm sure this is not lost on anyone, but what we think about as
"internal" and what we think about as newly exposed extension points
is an important design issue as we go forward. If it's to be useful in
2.x, the same probably applies, but I think it gets especially vital
in the 3.0 time frame.

>  >  Would there be any backwards compatibility issues with
>  > current plugins  should you drop TestCase? Seems like that
>  > would make it hard to make  one plugin that worked with all
>  > versions, wouldn't it?
>
>  In theory, there could be. However, these are intended as
>  NUnit internal implementation details. The way to write
>  one plugin that works across multiple versions is to stick
>  to the interfaces. That's just a bit hard to do right now.

Yup. Again, this is a good reason to get the extension points in 3.0
as good as we can the first time around, as there won't be a really
super good way to fix it until 4.0, which is hopefully years off.

-Kelly

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