Brian On Software

Last week, as I was integrating one of my client’s projects, I noticed that they were using NUnit 2.4.5 for writing and running their unit tests. This surprised me a lot, because for the past year I was working with the 2.4.3 release. I asked myself "Why would they use a beta candidate of NUnit instead of a stable release?" Little did I know that I was mislead for a long time.

In fact, the developer responsible for the project told me that the 2.4.5 release was not a beta version, but a stable release. Furthermore, I was told that this stable release has been available to the public for quite some time. As a matter of fact, have I checked the official NUnit website, I would’ve seen it too! That’s weird though, because visiting their official website we can clearly see that the most recent version is NUnit 2.4.3!

Well, this source of error and confusion on my part was because I thought the official NUnit’s website was at www.nunit.org. This is not correct. The official website for NUnit is actually www.nunit.com (or www.nunit.net, whichever you prefer).

It’s funny though, because searching for ‘NUnit’ on Google shows that www.nunit.org is the most popular link for NUnit. The www.nunit.com is shown at the third position. In the Olympics, a third position gives you a bronze medal. As far as I know, nobody remembers the name of the bronze medalist.

I wonder why the domain nunit.org doesn’t automatically redirect to nunit.com. If redirection is somewhat impossible for the site, why doesn’t the webmaster posts a message or an image informing us that the site is obsolete and that visitors should instead go to the new website? Why is there a nunit.com anyway? I wonder what was wrong with the nunit.org domain…

Anyhow, today I realize that there is a more recent version of NUnit available. I also realize that there is an official website for it (more official than the previous one I would think) at www.nunit.com. Furthermore, you can also visit www.nunit.net which is a replica of the official NUnit website.

There are a couple of things that we notice from this official website (as shown in Figure 1).

Observation #1. You see the copyright info at the bottom of the screen? It is without difficulty that we can agree that it is more recent than the nunit.org one. But have you noticed what is written on the right (between the copyright and the "All Rights Reserved" legal clause)? Yup, that’s right…"NUnit.org".

Observation #2. We see a notice telling us that nunit.com is the current up-to-date site for NUnit. The same notice appears on nunit.net. Well how come it doesn’t say the same thing on nunit.org? If it hadn’t been for that developer telling me about it, I guess I would still be using an old version of NUnit in my projects.

If this is big news for you, I urge you to peek at the release notes for the recent version (2.4.5 at the time of this writing).