Of course there is NUnit for unit testing, but our application is very userinterface-heavy, and while we will continue to provide NUnit test cases, they only cover one part.
Then there are the big players in user interface test automation like Rational Robot or Mercury QuickTest. But the licensing costs seemed disproportional here.
We actually have applied some of those tools on other, larger projects, e.g. I used to work on an Enterprise Java solution where one of my colleagues was solely responsible for maintaining and running a suite of test cases (Rational Robot mainly). For Java web as well as Swing rich client applications there is Apache JMeter, but I don't know of any .NET port. HttpUnit allows for testing at HTTP level by emulating browser behaviour. In .NET land we now have Microsoft Software Tester Team Center for Visual Studio 2005 / .NET 2.0. I am very impressed with what I have seen about Team System in general, but in this project we are stuck with .NET 1.1 at the moment.
One product I was particularly interested in just was a real pain in getting it up and running - downloading and registering additional plugins, just do find out it wouldn't work, that kind of stuff. So I gave up on that one. Of course, this vendor will have a sales representative call in some days after you filled in the download form. All I wanted was to download the trial version (if they ask for my email that's OK, but having to enter my phone number usually is a warning sight), and have it up and running within five minutes so I can start playing around. If that's not possible, it's a no-go.
Besides I only digged out some half-baked freeware solutions for .NET. Of course, as .NET WinForms are based on native window handles, any Win32 user interface test tool might have been fine as well. User-drawn controls are a little problem, as the test tools cannot attach to any handles of child controls, so they will only record screen coordinates on mouse-events. E.g. if your pulldown menu is user-drawn (the whole menu is represented by one single Window handle, but there isn't a Window handle for each menu item), and you add another menu item on top of others, your mouse-click coordinates won't fit any more.
Anyway, one of my colleagues finally stumbled upon AutomatedQA TestComplete. It was easy to use from the first moment on, came with all the features we need, had strong scripting capabilities, and was labeled at a fair price (USD 499 for the standard edition). Right now we are in the process of assembling a little test script library, and we are recording our first test cases. After a test case has been run, the script continues to check the database for valid processing. We are planing to run those scripts automatically each night on the latest source version.
I will continue to report about our experiences with TestComplete.