The Future of Cucumber on .NET

Beginning just over two years ago, I worked with some great developers to create Cuke4Nuke as a way to bring Cucumber to .NET. Shortly after the first releases of Cuke4Nuke, TechTalk released SpecFlow, a native .NET tool inspired by Cucumber. As a pure .NET solution without Ruby dependencies, SpecFlow seemed to be easier for Microsoft shops to adopt. But Cuke4Nuke had (to me) enough advantages that I kept it going.

By this summer, however, it was clear that SpecFlow had made up for most of Cuke4Nuke’s advantages and had more momentum in the .NET community and was under much more active development. There were just a few gaps SpecFlow needed to overcome (in my opinion), mostly related to better harmonization with the other Cucumber projects. (With the pure Java Cucumber-JVM under active development as a Cuke4Duke replacement, there was no longer as compelling an argument for shared code between Cucumber versions, Cuke4Nuke’s biggest remaining advantage.)

At AA-FTT and later in the week at Agile 2011, my colleague Paul Rayner and I met with Christian Hassa and Gaspar Nagy from the SpecFlow team. We discussed the few things that needed to change in SpecFlow to make it behave more like the other Cucumbers.

This week, most of those changes were released as part of SpecFlow 1.8. With that release, I’m letting Cuke4Nuke die. I won’t be maintaining or extending Cuke4Nuke. My Cucumber classes and book will cover SpecFlow rather than Cuke4Nuke.

I’ve had a great time getting to know the SpecFlow guys, and I look forward to collaborating with them in the future to help bring Cucumber to more and more teams in the Microsoft world.

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