After taking a closer look at continuous testing of JavaScript code, I'm moving on to other languages that transpile to JavaScript. I'll mostly be focusing on TypeScript, but there aren't many differences with other languages. I'll mention some of them at the end of this post.
Unit testing is a crucial part of development in any language, but its even more important in dynamically typed and interpreted languages such as JavaScript because there's no compiler doing at least basic validation of the code. Just like in .NET development, quick feedback is very valuable, and nothing can beat continuous testing in this field.
Ever since I have tried out NCrunch, I never looked back. Continuous running of tests as implemented in NCrunch significantly changed how I look at tests. Since then continuous testing has become much more mainstream and today both ReSharper and stock Visual Studio offer support for it. It was about time I took another look at the other tools and see how they compare to NCrunch today.
Static code analysis is a very useful feature of ReSharper. The generated warnings can help you fix bugs which might otherwise remain unnoticed. Unfortunately static analysis is not perfect and it might detect false positives. There are a couple of ways to tell it not to warn us about specific ones any more.
Since I usually write my unit tests in NUnit, I got into the habit of using parameterized tests when testing methods for which I need to check the result for many different input values. Unfortunately using NUnit is not an option with Windows Store apps. Only MSTest is supported, providing data-driven unit tests for such cases.