Today a friend was expressing concern about C# test loop times. Even going so far as comparing it to gasp C++

He challenged me to ” please see if you can get a smallish project, maybe 1K unit tests (ignore other tests) to build and run in <45s & blog it!!”

Well, lately I’ve been working on setting up a integration test suite for Ninject, so I was familiar with it as not just a small, fast C# library, But one that is quite popular.

So here is the result. For just the build/test of the core project total time from the command line is between 4-5 seconds. 2 of that is running the 223 unit and integration tests.

For a total CI package/build including generating packages for .Net 2.0, 3.5, 4.0, 3.5 compact, and silverlight 2, 3 and 4 which adds up to 669 tests takes around 1:45 - 2 minutes.

So I’d say that shows that .net is at least capable of having fast cycle times. The thing that’s still missing are good autotest tools. IntelliJ and Eclipse smoke VS in terms of testing and refactoring. ReSharper…as good as it is…does nothing for the rest of the bloat in studio.

Now, if only we could get JetBrains to make a ReSharper for MonoDevelop we would be all set.