14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has updated the tool designed to allow developers to perform Model-Based Testing in concert with the company’s development platform. Spec Explorer 2010 is now available for free via the Microsoft Download Center, and can be integrated with the latest milestone of Visual Studio 2010. Essentially, Spec Explorer 2010 is an add-in to Visual Studio Ultimate edition, and is set up to play nice with the Release Candidate (RC) build of the development platform.
Offered to testers as Release 3.1, the full build version number of Spec Explorer 2010 is 3.1.2356.0, the software giant informed. According to Robert DuWors, program manager on the Spec Explorer Team, Spec Explorer 2010 Release 3.1 is offered specifically for Visual Studio 2010 RC and brings to the table in excess of 220 bug fixes, but also major enhancements, and new features.
DuWors underlines that the evolution of Spec Explorer means that devs now get to take advantage of new attributes and classes. In fact, the recommendation from Microsoft is that early adopters running Spec Explorer 2010 for Visual Studio 2010 RC need to migrate away from older models and scripts. The reason is rather simple, and it revolves around the fact that users will be confronted with various warning messages if they insist on running deprecated items. Instead, Spec Explorer 2010 offers new core modeling attributes and classes, which have not only been relabeled but also revamped.
DuWors notes that “this release also contains significant new features including:
• Flexible test naming and attributes: New and revised switches allow finer control over test case naming and attributes including the ability to construct switch values using system environment variables and newly provided Spec Explorer built-in variables.
• Bounded repetition machine: Cord now supports additional ways to specify a repeating behavior for a specific number of times or a range of repetitions.
• New project creation: The Spec Explorer model project template can now be used to create a new project within an existing or a new solution whereas only solutions could be created before.
• Construct tag and switch completion: Cord now supports automatic completion of tags in the Construct statement and for switch names.
• F1 help: the built-in Help Viewer of Visual Studio 2010 will display top level information for each type of window in Spec Explorer using the F1 key.
• Help integration: Spec Explorer documentation is now fully integrated with the Help Manager to support both online MSDN Library viewing of help information and locally stored help content. The Help Manager can also be used to update the local copy of help documentation.
• Exploration progress: Spec Explorer provides updated status to give a better indication of the progress being made during lengthy explorations and related algorithms.
• User-customized post processing: User-defined post-exploration processing task can now be launched from within Visual Studio to generate additional artifacts.”
Spec Explorer 2010 Release 3.1 for Model-Based Testing in Visual Studio is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Premium Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.
.NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.