Good news, the pro version of Orcas (next version of Visual Studio), will include the unit testing features available in the Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers (from here on, VS for Devs). The big question is, will it be better than NUnit?

The team I work in uses NUnit for unit testing and I have not worked much with the unit testing built into the VS for Devs so I'm not sure of all the capabilities. The questions I am most interested in are...

• Can our current NUnit tests be converted to the MS unit test framework.
• Can the unit tests be run from a command-line build process without VS for Devs installed (or team system)?
• Can the unit tests be filtered so that only certain tests are run during builds?

I have yet to install Orcas. The latest CTP was released in March. There are rumors that another CTP will be released in this month (possibly even a beta). Perhaps if the beta is released I might install it on a virtual PC. I'm pretty excited about some of the new features, such as LINQ and extension methods (ScottGu's Blog has a good article on this). Hopefully they will be able to release Orcas some time this year (though I've heard rumors that it might not be until 2008!).