Release Notes: September 27, 2015

Hello, v2 2.1!

Today, we're shipping xUnit.net 2.1. This includes 2.1 RTM builds of the core framework and the Visual Studio runner.

It has been approximately 6 months since we shipped 2.0. Since that release was a ground-up rewrite, we spent the intervening time listening to developer feedback, improving the core framework as well as adding features that we weren't able to get into 2.0.

The DNX runner continues to remain in beta, tracking individual releases of the DNX framework; we expect that it will reach RTM when DNX does, early in 2016. Today's release includes a refreshed DNX runner Beta 5 build (2.1.0-beta5a-build188) which is linked against xUnit.net 2.1 RTM.

Once again, we'd like to thank all the users who contributed to the success of xUnit.net through usage, feedback, and code contributions. With this release including new support for Universal Windows Applications, we leaned heavily again on Oren Novotny and the team at Microsoft responsible for the Universal Windows tooling.

What's New

• Added support for Universal Windows Applications. For information about getting started with UWP, you can see our documentation:
  • Running tests inside Visual Studio
  • Running tests with Devices Runner
• A configuration feature (via App.config) was part of the 2.0 release, but only available to desktop unit tests. Configuration in 2.1 now includes JSON support, and is available on all platforms (assuming that the runner correctly reads and obeys the configuration file, of course). For more information, see Configuration Files
.
• Added a new IAsyncLifetime interface, which can be implemented by test classes and fixture classes to get asynchronous lifetime support (creation and disposal). This should make writing asynchronous setup and teardown code much simpler, because developers can use the async keyword.
• Class fixture classes can now use constructor injection to get access to collection fixtures.
• The [ClassData] attribute has be brought back.
• Attributes which derive from BeforeAfterTestAttribute can now be decorated onto test collection definition classes, and will be run for all tests in the test collection.
• Added support for desktop projects to run without app domains (in the console and MSBuild runners). This substantially improves startup and execution performance, at the cost of isolation.
• A new AssemblyRunner class was added to the runner utility libraries, that makes it substantially simpler for users who want to leverage xUnit.net to do non-testing activities (for example, to write a Best Practices Analyzer). Sample code: https://github.com/xunit/samples.xunit/blob/main/TestRunner/Program.cs
• A new extensibility feature was added to the text-based runners (console, MSBuild, and DNX) which allows developers to completely control the output from the runner. This feature—runner reporters—is how support for TeamCity and AppVeyor is implemented now.
• Runners which will immediately execute tests (like the console and MSBuild runners) no longer pre-enumerate theory data, to help improve discovery performance and reduce memory usage.
• Removed support for Windows 8 applications.
• The execution libraries (xunit.execution.*.dll) that shipped in 2.0 were consolidated down in two: xunit.execution.desktop.dll (for desktop usage, including AppDomain support) and xunit.execution.dotnet.dll (for all other usage, including DNX, Windows, Windows Phone, Android, and iOS). By reducing the execution library count from 7 to 2, it makes it simpler for developers to provide extensions to the testing framework.
• The runner utility libraries (xunit.runner.utility.*.dll) were also reduced down to two: xunit.runner.utility.desktop.dll (which can run all tests) and xunit.runner.utility.dotnet.dll (which can run tests linked again xunit.execution.dotnet.dll). Since the runner libraries are intended to be backward compatible, they can run tests written against xUnit.net 1.9.2 and 2.0.

Release Notes

The following individual releases contributed to 2.1:

• March 21st (2.1 Beta 1)
• May 3rd (2.1 Beta 2)
• June 30th (2.1 Beta 3)
• July 13th (VS Runner 2.0.1)
• August 4th (2.1 Beta 4)
• September 6th (2.1 RC 1)
• September 20th (2.1 RC 2)

Copyright © .NET Foundation. Contributions welcomed at https://github.com/xunit/xunit/tree/gh-pages.