I am happy to announce the product that I have been working a lot on recently: Deveroom – a new Visual Studio extension for SpecFlow.

SpecFlow had Visual Studio integration right from the beginning. The original “SpecFlow for Visual Studio” extension has been developed originally for Visual Studio 2008 with a Java-based Gherkin parser. Both Visual Studio and the Gherkin parser have significantly changed through the years and it became more and more difficult to maintain that project. It was time to rewrite.

With Deveroom my goal is to support the SpecFlow and BDD community with a good and sustainable Visual Studio integration.

Here are the most important features supported currently.

• Support for all SpecFlow versions and all project types, including SpecFlow v3 on .NET Core and SDK-style projects
• Gherkin syntax coloring and keyword completion with new colors, context-sensitive keyword completion and highlighting syntax errors
• Step definition matching with Navigate to step definition and Define Step wizard (you need to build the project)
• Hassle-free ‘Add new feature file’ that skips design-time code generation setting when unnecessary and works with .NET Core projects as well

Sustainability

Sustainability is an important goal and it has several aspects.

• Test-Driven: One aspect is to cover the extension with automated tests. While the automated testing of Visual Studio extensions is still challenging, Deveroom has got already 89 scenarios and 135 unit tests that cover the core business logic.
• DevOps: Developing such an extension is an integration nightmare, because many people use it in many different environments to develop SpecFlow projects on different platforms. While Deveroom has automated tests for example for checking whether it works with different SpecFlow versions (from v1.9 to v3.0.169-beta), we cannot cover all combinations. But we have detailed logging, monitoring and in some cases, you will also be asked to report a particular error. Your help is indispensable.
• Business: Reaching the feature set of the old extension is my primary goal, but there are so many other things that could make SpecFlow development easier and there are IDEs, like Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio for Mac that doesn’t have rich support. To enrich these, our plan is to introduce a business model, where the core editing and navigation features will be free, but we plan to add further convenience and collaboration features as part of a paid subscription.

Please give a try to Deveroom and send feedback

At this point what we need is feedback. Feedback about integration issues, missing features, suggestions or ideas.
Please register your suggestions and issues in our issue tracker on GitHub or leave a comment here.

You can install Deveroom from the Visual Studio marketplace. From Visual Studio, select “Tools / Extensions and Updates…” from the menu, switch to “Online” and search for “Deveroom“. Click on the “Download” button for the Deveroom extension. You need to restart Visual Studio to finalize the installation.

More information

Please find more information, like feature list, roadmap and FAQ on our website: https://www.specsolutions.eu/services/deveroom/