Bil Simser recently asked this question of Scott Bellware, a Microsoft MVP:

“Why NUnit and not VSTS since the mothership is your home? I’m all for NUnit and whatnot, but I thought this would be an opportunity to show that MS products really can be extended. Or are you leaving that up as an exercise for us mere mortals to do?”

Scott ended up blasting MSTest and the developers that built it, suggesting that there is much more innovation and possibilities in an open source environment.

“I personally don’t use MS Test. It’s a niche product built by a team that was largely detached from the developer testing community. It’s mostly visual glitz aimed at people who don’t really have the experience to be discerning, and who can be manipulated into buying tools by blinking lights and shiny surfaces. The VSTS product line segmentation is out of touch with the reality of the cross-functional roles that developers are increasingly called to play. It’s way over-priced.

There would be little value in me writing extensions for MS Test. The limited community of folks who have adopted it are largely following Microsoft’s guidance on developer testing and thus are missing the BDD point as widely as Microsoft missed the TDD point. The open source world is innovating in this space much faster than Microsoft can hope to - both in tooling and the approaches driving the tooling.”

I cant say that I disagree with Scott, but something tells me that he might not get his MVP status renewed… unfortunately.