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My previous work involved writing embedded Linux code. We used a couple of the embedded devices in a test harness, a Linux PC and the Windows Perforce repository. The Linux PC ran an instance of FitNesse and used (among other things) the CommandLineFixture to cross-compile the latest binaries, deploy them to the target, and then execute the tests.

My current project involved the Microsoft stack, developing web services. I would like to be able to use FitNesse to test out this system, but I'm at a loss as to where to start. The Linux system meant all that bash scripting goodness, so building (make), deployment (ssh or scp) and collating results (scp) were all easy.

I'm assuming I can use a similar chain under Windows-only:

  • MSBuild for building
  • putty for deployment / collating results

but deployment of IIS web services seems more complex than just copying files.

Do you have any pointers?

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  • Peter, if you are testing web services in the .net stack, why don't you consider just using the mstest unit testing infrastructure as a client calling the web services. I know that you don't get fit as a front end, but it can solve a lot of the other issues. You could consider using spcflow in leiu of fit.
    – Bruce McLeod
    Commented Jun 4, 2011 at 7:44
  • @Bruce McLeod: Thanks for your thoughts! I have been investigating specflow, too, so thanks for the recommendation.
    – Peter K.
    Commented Jun 4, 2011 at 13:29
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    What's your general deployment strategy? Do you have Dev, QA, and production environments? And yes, deployment to IIS is complicated. But it IS doable, via msbuild. Google around for msbuild/iis deployment options and you'll find info on how to do it.
    – Stephen Gross
    Commented Nov 8, 2011 at 18:36
  • @StephenGross: "Dev" environment tends to be developer local. Other than that, yes, we have QA and production. I'll have more of a poke. This is starting to become a bigger issue.
    – Peter K.
    Commented Nov 15, 2011 at 20:41
  • @PeterK. In our case, we use Local, Dev, QA, and Production. Local is indeed possible, but obviously you have to configure it correctly.
    – Stephen Gross
    Commented Nov 16, 2011 at 15:34

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I've been using SpecFlow, C#, NUnit and WebDriver to handle much of this. I write all of my tests within Visual Studio and use PowerShell to check source out, compile and start the tests to check my site and services. This gives it a nice framework feel, and once the updated Build System is complete I can add my tests into the build system, my PowerShell commands are written as functions so it will be easier to run the tests. I used Fitnesse before and had some success with it, but had problems migrating the tests across servers, even using REST I had issues and a lot of scripts that I really didn't need for what I was doing. SpecFlow and NUnit gave me the ability to reuse more of my scripts than Fitnesse did, mostly for being able to direct my tests to different machines which I found difficult to do in Fitnesse and easy to do in SpecFlow and NUnit.

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  • Apologies it's taken so long to give you the tick! I eventually went with something not unlike what you describe, which was easier than Fitnesse in an MS environment.
    – Peter K.
    Commented Oct 28, 2015 at 9:02

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