Friday, September 21, 2007

NCover is now commercial, but friendly to open source

Unless you've been coding under a blogosphere rock  you've heard that NCover has now gone commercial.  NCover has become a staple in many developer toolboxes.  I can understand this move.  People are so busy today that it's becoming increasingly hard to get people to contribute time to a good open source project.  And even fewer contribute money.  Unless you are functionally wealthy (read: actually wealthy or a nothing-better-to-do college kid), finding the time to significantly push projects forward can be daunting.

So the guys behind NCover and NCoverExplorer have banded together and formed a new organization named Gnoso.  Their first product is NCover 2.0 (now up to 2.0.1) and is available in x32 professional and x64 enterprise editions.

While the prices of these two products are fair, I really appreciate their friendliness to open source.  They are offering free pro licenses to developers who fall into one of three different categories:  prior donators, educational developers, or open source developers.  You can read all about it here.

I've got my license.  Have you?

18 comments:

  1. i hope the price is fair.. ;)

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  2. Open source ftw!

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  3. Invisible Fence ® Independent service in OregonFebruary 7, 2009 at 9:04 AM

    This series has carried on for a while now. In the process, I’ve covered setting up and organizing a Subversion repository for code versioning, using NAnt for automated builds, FxCop and NDepend for code analysis and metrics, and NUnit for unit tests. The preceding sections are linked below for reference.

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  4. Landscaping, Excavation Drainage MT PoconoFebruary 8, 2009 at 6:34 PM

    ... NCoverExplorer, the popular coverage viewer, now included with NCover ... NCover is great.. But how will the movement to commercial help? ... I am waiting to see what this move from open source to commerical product does. ...

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  5. Los Angeles immigration lawyerFebruary 17, 2009 at 5:39 AM

    Currently NCover 1.5.2 can only be run under an account with administrator rights. There is a workaround for this problem which you can find at the end of this post.

    NCover 1.5.3 no longer has this problem and can be run from a non-administrator account without requiring a workaround.

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  6. Code coverage products improve error detection in the product development stage by proactively pinpointing areas of code that have not been sufficiently tested or where overly complex code could indicate potential bugs or performance issues. This early detection of potential buggy code significantly reduces the risk of depleting your expectant bottom line through expensive post-shipping bug fixes.

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  7. Which is your preferred build process?

    * A NAnt build file
    * Devenv.exe (i.e. Visual Studio)
    * Console or batch script

    There is no preferred way, all three mechanisms will be supported going forward. Choose the one that's best for your project.

    One of the next enhancements to NCover will be a Visual Studio add in.

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  8. planning personal finance softwareFebruary 20, 2009 at 6:48 PM

    From time to time I try to chip in with support on the NCover forums, not only with NCoverExplorer issues but NCover as well since they are so dependent. There are a bunch of issues which come up repeatedly, particularly for people new to using NCover.

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  9. NCover 2.0, the new commercial release, offers support for ASP.NET code running in IIS, for Windows Services applications and for 64-bit versions of Windows. In addition, the product includes support for branch coverage reporting and HTML coverage reporting. Finally, the coverage view tool NCoverExplorer is part of the NCover package.

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  10. Is NCover and mbUnit still working together? I have an NUnit project that works fine with NCover. If I make just the absolute minimum number of changes to get one test working with mbUnit.cons and NCover, the coverage.log file starts showing the following line: "MESSAGE: Failed to load symbols for module [testcoverasm.dll] in [c:\projects\testcoverasm\target]." and coverage shows up empty.

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  11. Germination graines de cannabisMarch 2, 2009 at 2:58 PM

    NCover provides a great measurement tool to determine how good your tests really are. It's a great way to see where additional testing is needed.

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  12. SEO service hits the right noteMarch 2, 2009 at 8:20 PM

    The basic MP3 feed is here, and the iPod friendly one is here. .... It's great that some OS products can turn into commercial apps with an OS "lite" version. ... This Open Source stuff is free. But it's free like a puppy. .... SharpDevelop2 (starting with revision 1057) now supports code coverage in the IDE and ...

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  13. Ok, so after a few years of no changes we have decided to resurrect the project because the "other" and somewhat more professional and official version of NCover has gone "Commercial". We’re not trying to give them a hard time, fully understand their reasoning, but feel that there _must_ be a free code coverage tool for .NET out there. So...here we go, we’ll see how far we can get. Let us know what you want to add, or what we are missing compared to the bigger NCover, and we’ll give it a go.

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  14. Radio Fence Pet Containment SystemMarch 12, 2009 at 11:29 PM

    Peter Waldschmidt nicely summarises in the new NCover blog his thoughts and rationale behind the decision to transition to a commercialised product. We've been talking about the combined possibilities for a little while now until the timing came right for Peter to make it all happen and start the Gnoso team.

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  15. Gnoso, a Greenville, SC based software products company, announced the availability of NCover 2.0, a newly enhanced version of the NCover code coverage analysis tool for developers on Microsoft's .NET runtime. NCover provides a measurement of code quality to developers by directly correlating software tests to the code that is exercised by those tests. NCover has grown in popularity over the past four years as the most popular and trusted code coverage profiler for the Microsoft .NET runtime.

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  16. Custom Research PaperMarch 20, 2009 at 10:51 AM

    Gnoso is where great "what ifs" are transformed into great software. We created our first product, NCover, to make it easier to create quality code for the .NET platform. With over 100,000 downloads since 2004, we're making good on that goal.

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  17. replica Louis Vuitton handbagsJune 15, 2009 at 4:25 PM

    vailable in x32 professional and x64 enterprise editions.

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  18. Christian AudigierJuly 13, 2009 at 8:57 PM

    Very interesting topic will bookmark your site to check if you write more about in the future.

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