Gallio + PowerShell

Nobody is perfect: I am fond of PowerShell. Yes, I know, the PowerShell language syntax is a bit weird sometimes (Do you know any other languages where you use command switches to compare things?), but despite the ugly look of the scripts, this is a very powerful tool.

Gallio has a very handy snap-in for PowerShell, written by Julian Hidalgo and Jeff Brown. It adds a very useful cmdlet which controls the Gallio test runners. The snap-in is configured by the installer. You just need to ensure that the correct install options are checked.



Once Gallio is installed, start the PowerShell console, then load the snap-in in memory with the following command:

Add-PSSnapIn Gallio

Then you can run your test suite by calling Run-Gallio with the appropriate arguments.

Run-Gallio MyTests.dll

More help about the arguments can be found with the following command:

Get-Help Run-Gallio -detailed

One of the most interesting features of PowerShell is that it is entirely object oriented. In that context, the Gallio PowerShell Snap-In provides a complete report object as result. The object is of type Gallio.Runner.TestLauncherResult. Sorry, no online document is available for the moment. But you can get additional details by opening the offline API documentation. There should be a shortcut copied somewhere by the Gallio installer in the start menu. [Update 11/12/2008: Online document is now available on the Gallio website.]



It is easy to look at the result properties, and make the appropriate actions. For instance, you can decide to interrupt the execution of the script if at least one unit test has failed.

Add-PSSnapIn Gallio
$result = Run-Gallio MyTests.dll

if ($result.Statistics.FailedCount -gt 0)
{
  Write-Warning "Some unit tests have failed."
  Exit
}