Touch.Unit vs NUnitLite 1.0

In case you have not noticed NUnitLite has picked up speed in the last few months.

Xamarin.iOS 7.0 shipped with NUnitLite 0.9 – itself announced right before WWDC2013, i.e. when the 6.9 series began its summer-alpha life. Then just a few days before iOS7 went gold (and way too close to update it) the one-dot-oh version was released.

NUnitLite has grown quite a lot since we started using the 0.6 version two years ago. IMHO the most recent and exciting enhancement is related to async test support. That’s something I missed a lot from the Silverlight test harness we used back then for Moonlight.

What’s presently shipping with Xamarin.iOS 7.0 already has support for async tests – but don’t stop reading yet! Still there are a few issues because the runner (Touch.Unit) needs to run some code on the main (UI) thread – which was never an issue before executing async tests (yep, that means testing the test runner). The known issues were fixed along with the update to 1.0, so stuff like this will now work as expected:

[Test]
public async Task NestedAsync ()
{
   // thanks to Greg Shackles for this small gem
   await Task.Run (async () => {
      await Task.Delay (1000);
   });
   Assert.Pass ("Delayed");
}

So if you’re curious about the latest features (async or not) and can’t wait for the next Xamarin.iOS then I encourage you to try it today right off my github repositories for Touch.Unit (the iOS based runner) and NUnitLite. Please file any issue so we can make 1.0 shine in a future release of Xamarin.iOS!