With the documentation for MbUnit v2 done and dusted last year, thoughts turn to missives and tutorials for MbUnit v3 and the Gallio platform. Jeff and the team have done a huge amount of work maintaining the API documentation as they’ve gone along, but the book project that has always been planned is a bit thin on the ground.

With Gallio/MbUnit v3.1 close around the corner then, we’ve decided to reboot the Gallio Book project and made a new outline for the first part of the book – Using MbUnit & Gallio – which you can view here. We’ve also created a new Google group for the Book project. Anyone who’d be interested in writing, reviewing the book should join the group and get in touch. If you’d just like to suggest content to be included in the book, again either join the group, or leave a comment. We’ve also got a basic progress chart for the book where you can check progress on the chapters you are most interested in.

If you know MbUnit or indeed if you don’t, consider getting involved, learning the tool and learning how the book process works. It’s just about hacking words and pictures instead of code. Hopefully I’ll see some of you at Gallio-Book.

It's only been a few weeks since v3.0.4 was released, but Jeff has shipped v3.0.5 of Gallio and MbUnit. Full details can be found on his blog but here's a quick list of additions.

• Assert.AreApproximatelyEqual added to MbUnit
• Test Factories (TestSuites) added to MbUnit
• Formatter for objects being tested to be displayed in MbUnit test reports
• AutoCAD Integration for Gallio
• Running x86 tests as 32-bit on x64
• Preview of VS2010 CTP Support for Gallio
• Many other bugfixes and updated tools support

The full list is on Jeff's blog. Download v3.0.5 here and read the documentation here.

Jeff has announced the release of Gallio and MbUnit v3.0.4.

Today we are releasing v3.0.4 of Gallio and MbUnit.  This release incorporates many new features as well improvements for robustness.

New asserts, assertion diffs, 0rdered tests, Rollback, Repeat, ThreadedRepeat, R# 4.1, VSTS, CSUnit, TeamCity, Gallio.Ambience, clickable report links (IE/Firefox integration), and more...

Try it out!  Please be aware that there are now separate x86 and x64 installers.

Download here: http://www.gallio.org/Downloads.aspx

Documentation here: http://www.gallio.org/Docs.aspx

[...]

The whole alpha / beta thing got too confusing in the end due to scope creep so I dropped it. In any case, this release is pretty much feature-complete.

The full announcement and complete rundown of the new features can be found here on Jeff's blog. Congrats to him, Vadim, Graham and the rest of the team.

Well, it's been a while and as Jeff leads Gallio into the autumn sunshine, it's time to push out a little something for those still using MbUnit v2. You may recall, back in August last year, we launched docs.mbunit.com. Regrettably, it's been quite static since then but now the monster is complete there's some progress.

Here then is a first draft of complete documentation for all the assert classes, attributes, helper and exception classes in the MbUnit.Framework namespace only as found in MbUnit v2.4. Call it the October 2008 CTP if you will.

You can download it from this site until I find somewhere stable to put it. Feel free to let me know what you think of the style, what other MbUnit namespaces you'd like documented in full either here or via the MbUnit-User group.

One of the interesting aspects of backfilling documentation is uncovering methods few seem to have discovered. Case in point, the Assert.AreValueEqual method in MbUnit v2. Rather than the straightforward AreEqual methods to compare the values of a property in an object or the AreSame methods to compare whether two objects are actually the identical object or of the same type, AreValueEqual verifies that two objects, expected and actual,

• both have a property described a PropertyInfo object,
• that the property is not null,
• and that the value of the property in both objects is equal.

It's a bit of a black box tester then and works across class hierarchies.

More...