I am confused on unit testing from "Professional XNA Game Programming" book. For example, how do I do unit testing on "Racing Game Simple"?

You can either use TestDriven.NET or NUnit and start all dynamic unit tests from the assembly, which is not all that exciting.

OR you can start the much more exciting static unit tests directly from the UnitTests.cs file, just uncomment the line you want to test and press F5 to start the game. Alternatively you can also start unit tests from the command line, e.g. "RacingGameSimple.exe -TestCarModel" will show the car model from the game in a special unit test or "RacingGameSimple.exe -TestRenderTrack" will show the track generation code from, etc.

For more information read the end of Chapter 14 or just take a look into UnitTests.cs

http://abi.exdream.com

I think that there's a problem with the VC# IDE. The drop-down listbox that says "Debug", "Release", and "Configuration Manager" is grayed out and I can't choose "Debug". I think that I need to use "Debug" for unit testing. When I try to use unit testing, the game starts normally and when I exit the game, I get an empty game window with light gray background and the only way to exit the game is to call up the Task Manager and terminate the game.

Ohh I see. You can enable the DEBUG define in the project properties window in Visual C# Express. Just right click on your project, select Properties and go the the Build screen. There you can enable debugging yourself (even if there is no Release/Debug Configuration Option available where it would be in VS 2005).

BTW: Some of the projects have a release/debug configuration just because I created them in VS 2005 and then just continued working in Visual C# Express. I guess this can also be fixed by adding something to the .vsproj file (just compare them where it works and where it does not work).

http://abi.exdream.com

I found out that unit testing worked on 2D games from the book and don't work on 3D games from the book. 2D games usually have two source files and 3D games usually have source files in few folders. I tried to use NUnit on one of the programs generated from XNA but I got "This assembly was not built with any known testing framework" messages.

To use Nunit or TestDriven.NET I have to use VS2005 and not the Express Edition right?

NUnit is an external application, which works fine with XNA Game Studio or Visual C# Express and you can use the NUnitFramework.dll just fine from there.

TestDriven.NET on the other hand is an addon for Visual Studio 2003/2005/Orcas, etc. but from time to time there are versions, which work in the Express version too, just try it out :)

http://abi.exdream.com

Am I right in thinking it is pretty pointless developing in the full version of VS2005 because the Content pipeline does not work?