This article provides a step by step introduction to Pex in Visual Studio 2008 or 2010 CTP. You will learn how to analyze existing code with a few clicks in the code editor, how to create test cases that reproduce issues that Pex finds and debug such issues, how to let Pex generate and save an entire test suite, how to write parameterized unit tests and also why parameterized unit tests will change the way you write unit tests.
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Jonathan de Halleux is Civil Engineer in Applied Mathematics. He finished his PhD in 2004 in the rainy country of Belgium. After 2 years in the Common Language Runtime (i.e. .net), he is now working at Microsoft Research on Pex (http://research.microsoft.com/pex).
Nikolai Tillmann is a Principal Research Software Design Engineer at Microsoft Research.
His main area of research is program specification, analysis, testing, and verification. He is leading the Pex project (http://research.microsoft.com/Pex), a framework for runtime verification and automatic test case generation for .NET applications based on parameterized unit testing and dynamic symbolic execution.
Previous projects he worked on include AsmL, an executable modeling language, and the Spec Explorer 2004 model-based testing tool. He contributed to XRT, a concrete/symbolic state exploration engine and software model-checker for .NET code. Spec Explorer 2007 is based on this engine, which is now productized internally by the Protocol Engineering Team at Microsoft to facilitate quality assurance of protocol documentation.
He received his M.S. ("Diplom") in Computer Science from the Technical University of Berlin in 2000.