Today marks an important day for the NCrunch project.  In the 18 months since the beta programme started, NCrunch has seen over 400 distinctive fixes, compatibility improvements and new features introduced.  While no software product is ever perfect, and the word 'finished' will always be very subjective in product terms, I'm convinced that the tool is now reliable enough to drop the 'b' from the end of the version number.  So if anyone spots any 'b's sitting on version numbers in the v1.42 build just released, please let me know .. as it's most certainly a bug!

As disclosed in previous posts on this blog, the end of the NCrunch beta programme marks the beginning of rolling annual commercially licensed releases.  Although never a popular choice, this is a path that is being taken to ensure future development of the software and in the best interests of helping it to reach its full potential.  v1.42 is the first release to include these new licensing features.  I hope that many NCrunch beta testers will continue along for the ride, and for those of you choosing to part ways with the product here, I hope that NCrunch has helped you uncover the potential of concurrent testing and that you will continue to watch this space closely.

As v1.41b is due to expire at the end of this month, a major priority was to keep the v1.42 release as low risk as possible.  This means that v1.42 isn't a big release - the changes have been carefully limited to critical and low risk changes.  Still, I hope many people will still find things in this release that make it worth the upgrade.  Significant changes in v1.42 include:

- New configuration options controlling the background colours for NCrunch tool panes in the IDE (these can be used to configure NCrunch for limited support with the new VS 2012 dark theme)

- The ability to run static Xunit tests (this should make many F# people very happy)

- NUnit 2.6.1 support

- Portable class library (Silverlight/Metro) project build support

A full list of changes is also available.

The v1.42 release coincided with a major upgrade of the NCrunch website (which I'm sure you'll have noticed already!).  The new design is intended to bring the website more in line with the character of NCrunch, while also including new product support and license purchasing features.  If you have an existing account with the NCrunch forum, this account will have been automatically migrated to the new website, so there's no need to sign up with a new one.  As the new website hasn't seen much daylight yet, I'm anxious to hear about any issues experienced or opinions to be expressed.

I want to take a moment to thank everyone for all your feedback and support through the NCrunch beta programme.  I hope that the tool has been of great value to you and that you intend to continue along for the ride, as we explore the future possibilities of concurrent automated testing!

Go grab v1.42!!