Pressing F5 in Test Methods to Test

Last night, as I was about to stop work to spend some time with the family, I noticed this tweet:

And I thought: You can do this in CodeRush. Easily. CodeRush has a remarkably flexible shortcut-binding system that can associate a sophisticated context (that must be satisfied) with any key binding. So it’s relatively simple to bind F5 to a command to run the test when the caret is inside a test method. You just need a context that tells the key-binding engine whether you’re in a test method or not.

CodeRush ships about 200 different contexts, that can do anything from tell you whether you are inside a property’s getter to whether the active project references a particular assembly. Contexts are used in shortcut bindings as well as other editor features.

After seeing the tweet, I checked to see if we already shipped a context that was satisfied when the caret was inside a test method. We did not.

This morning I noticed more discussion about this feature, including a suggestion to use another shortcut (which increases user burden and cognitive load – lots of good reasons NOT to do this), followed by this tweet from Caleb Jenkins:

Time to get to work.

Here’s how I built the feature, in about three minutes:

1. CodeRush | New Plug-in.
2. Dropped a ContextProvider control onto the design surface.
3. Named it “Editor\Code\InTestMethod”.
4. Double-clicked the ContextSatisfied event. Added this code:
   
   

   private void ctxInTestMethod_ContextSatisfied(ContextSatisfiedEventArgs ea)
   {   Method activeMethod = CodeRush.Source.ActiveMethod;   if (activeMethod != null && activeMethod.Attributes != null)     foreach (DevExpress.CodeRush.StructuralParser.Attribute attribute in activeMethod.Attributes)       if (attribute.Name != null && attribute.Name.StartsWith("Test"))       {         ea.Satisfied = true;         return;       }
   }
   

5. Pressed F5 to run (to test my plug-in).
6. In the new instance of VS, added the following CodeRush shortcut binding:
   
   
   

And that’s it.

Now I can press F5 inside a test method and only that method test is run. If I press F5 outside of a test method, the startup project runs.

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