From Monday to Wednesday next week, I'm on a Microsoft training course in London. The course was free, as the organisation I work for got some free training vouchers included with our Microsoft Enterprise Licensing agreement.

The course title is Core Distributed Application Development with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. Over three days, it covers .Net remoting, web services and message queuing. I'm looking forward to the course, as I haven't studied distributed development since the VB6 days, so it will be interesting to compare the old with the new. Sadly, though, I think the course content is mostly redundant now that remoting and web services have been superseded by Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) in .Net framework 3.0.

I'm using my current project at work to experiment with test-driven development. After some initial research, I settled on the popular nUnit unit testing framework. Installation was trouble-free, but getting the tool to integrate into Visual Studio 2005 was impossible and it seems this isn't an uncommon issue. I got the console version working as an "External Tool" on the Tools menu, but for some unknown reason, the GUI version wouldn't work and I kept getting a "FileNotFoundException" when trying to run my tests. After some tinkering, I eventually got the GUI version to run my unit test project. To save you having the same problems I had, I've listed the steps I went through below:

• Set the unit test project to be the startup project
• Open the "Project Properties" page and click the Debug tab
• In the Start Action section, select "Start external program" and enter the path to the nUnit GUI executable file
• Set the "Command line arguments" to the name of the unit test project (.vbproj or .csproj)
• Set the "Working directory" to the path containing the unit test project

Save the project settings, hit F5 and hey presto! The nUnit GUI should fire up and load the assembly containing your tests, ready to run.