With Christmas just around the corner, I've been working hard on getting v1.43 ready for public release.

The main purpose of v1.43 is to address usability and compatibility issues identified with prior NCrunch builds.  There's also a few goodies in here that I'm sure many people will find useful.

Highlights of 1.43 are:

Performance Improvements

1.43 is the fastest NCrunch build yet to hit release.  This build contains a fix for a serious performance issue that was causing instrumentation times to be elevated for large assemblies (i.e. > 50,000 line of code).  When running 1.43 against large test projects, benchmarks showed a very significant reduction in build times.  One project that took more than 1 minute and 20 seconds to build on 1.42 took only 18 seconds under 1.43!

Bad MS Build Reference Detection

Ever had that problem where MSBuild/VS was relying on referenced assemblies in the bin\debug directory of your project but never thought to tell you?  Up until now, these problems could only be identified by cleaning up all project outputs or by freshly checking a solution out of source control.  1.43 introduces a feature that will detect these situations and warn you about them, so you can clean up your references properly and get away from that nasty implicit behaviour!

Ignored Test Visibility

A problem people often encounter with NCrunch is that when they ignore a test using NCrunch configuration, it's easy to forget that the test was ignored and it can be hard to work out why the test isn't running anymore.  This can be a huge time waster and actually generates quite a few bug reports.  1.43 introduces a new coverage marker that can identify the first line of the test as being specifically 'ignored', so you'll always know why it isn't being run.

Improved Handling of PCL and Metro/Modern/WinRT Project Builds

While full support for these new project types is still a work in progress, 1.43 introduces a number of build engine and instrumentation improvements in this area.  Hopefully, these projects should now all be building happily with NCrunch.  If not, please let me know!  NCrunch doesn't officially support these project types yet, but we're getting closer :)

Fixes, Fixes, Fixes!

1.43 also contains another round of stability and compatibility improvements.  Check out the full list of changes here.

So what have you got to lose?  Upgrade to 1.43 now!  As a minor release, it's completely free for all licensed users.

******** Update December 11th:

If anyone has had problems with the new 1.43 build throwing access denied exceptions when copying read-only resource files, please try re-dowloading and installing the latest revision from the download page.  v1.43.0.22 contains a regression issue that prevents NCrunch from correctly handling read-only resource files with the 'Copy referenced assemblies to workspace' option enabled.  v1.43.0.23 (now on the download page) fixes this issue.  Sorry for the trouble.