NCover Desktop is an essential tool in helping developers find where they can improve their tests, and their code, as early in the development cycle as possible. Effective tests are critical for delivering high quality code, reducing risks and maintenance costs, and increasing customer satisfaction. NCover Desktop is the first step in ensuring your code is thoroughly tested, enabling development team members to identify issues at the individual level before they become team, project, or customer problems.
Developers can use NCover Desktop to collect coverage across any number of different scenarios, including profiling .NET web applications, Windows Store apps, and unit tests. In fact, NCover Desktop can profile any .NET code loaded on the machine where it’s installed. NCover Desktop collects coverage on Windows Store apps using pre-instrumentation. NCover Desktop can collect coverage on NUnit tests and collect coverage on tests run with MSTest.
NCover Desktop also includes an integrated Visual Studio extension called Bolt that includes both a code coverage tool and a test runner. The Bolt Visual Studio Extension provides NCover Desktop users with all of the tools developers need to write well-tested, bug-free code inside the Visual Studio IDE. TheBolt Visual Studio Extension provides branch coverage visualization, source code highlighting, and coverage statistics in a developer-centric code coverage view. In addition, theBolt Visual Studio Extension includes a multi-platform test runner so you can quickly test code as an integrated part of your agile development process. Test results generated by theBolt Visual Studio Extension can be linked to a project in NCover Desktop. Linking tests results to NCover Desktop provides access to complete trend analysis tools and HTML reporting capabilities.
TheBolt Visual Studio Extension is a great solution for covering either MSTest or NUnit tests in Visual Studio, but does have some limitations. For example, certain test attributes are not currently supported. We encourage you to review the complete list of supported test attributes prior to getting started. NCover supports Visual Studio 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2015 professional and Community editions. However, the Bolt Visual Studio Extension cannot be installed on Express editions of Visual Studio, which don’t support third-party extensions at all, only extensions created by Microsoft.
NCover Desktop is the right solution for developers who want to collect coverage on their .NET applications or unit tests. The Bolt Visual Studio Extension enhances the functionality of NCover Desktop through direct integration with Visual Studio and provides the greatest value when tests run by theBolt Visual Studio Extension are linked to a NCover Desktop project.