Uncovering the New NCover

The NCover project has entered a new era. If you’ve looked around the rest of the web site already, you’ve probably noticed the complete overhaul of our site. Since the NCover 1.5.8 release in April, we’ve been working on an upgraded version of NCover. We’ve made a large number of improvements in the product. Check the list of highlights on the “What’s New” page and let us know what you think.

Over the past few years, NCover has become a tool that many development teams rely on daily for their continuous build processes. As such, we have gotten many requests for help and additional features. As a part-time project, there was no way I could give it the time it deserved. A short time ago, I began to realize that the only way to provide the kind of support that NCover needed was to create a sustainable business model around NCover. Over the past 6 months, I’ve been putting that business model together. I’ve hired a team of talented developers to help me maintain and support the product. We’ve partnered with (the sharp and tireless) Grant Drake to roll NCoverExplorer into the NCover project. The team has written sorely needed documentation for NCover and NCoverExplorer (and there’s more to come). In short, NCover has needed to become an enterprise-class tool for .NET developers, and with 2.0 we’ve made that step.

In determining pricing for NCover, we’ve done our best to price it well within the range of comparable development tools in the market. NCover owes a debt of gratitude to the .NET developer community for putting up with a beta-quality product since the beginning of the project. So, in order to ease the transition of NCover from a free to not-free product we are taking the following steps.

  1. Gnoso will provide a free NCover 2.0 Enterprise license plus a one year support subscription to everyone who made a donation of any size to the NCover project before today. (Yes, I have a list). If you are one of those people, please contact us to redeem your free license.
  2. Gnoso will provide free NCover 2.0 Professional licenses to educational institutions for use in educating the next generation of developers. We believe that test-driven agile development processes need to be taught in computer science curricula and we want to support that effort in any way possible.
  3. Gnoso will provide free NCover 2.0 Professional licenses to open source projects to support development of their projects. Many free/open source projects have embraced NCover by adding NCover integration to their tools or by using NCover in their testing and build processes. We’d like to see these teams continue to succeed. If you are an active developer on a .NET open source project, please contact us to get more information about working with the NCover team.

This is a monumental step for the NCover team and we know it’s just the beginning. We are wide open to feedback from you, our customers. Please try out the new version and let us know how we are doing. The product is much improved, but I’m sure we didn’t get everything exactly right. We’d love to know how NCover can work better for you.