I'm pleased to announce that the Silverlight Unit Test Framework received honorable mention at the Microsoft Engineering Excellence awards ceremony this evening. It's great having the tool recognized as an important contribution to not only the success of Silverlight, but also to the success of so many development and test partners, both inside and outside Microsoft. I really would like to thank each and every person who's been able to use the tool. I really appreciate the feedback and conversations many of us have had to work to make improvements over the years (Wow, has it been so long?!).

What's this all about?

Each year, Microsoft holds an Engineering Forum, jam-packed with sessions and talks much like an industry conference, focusing on everything from the core engineering disciplines to trustworthy computing and everything inbetween. During the forum, a select set of awards are given out to a select innovations, recognizing teams and individuals for their successful engineering feats helping the company to ship safer, quicker, and better all-around software to the world. The criteria is challenging, nomination count very high, and the selection process intense. Although the test framework wasn't selected as a finalist, it did receive honorable mention, which is enough to make me happy. It was also great hearing a little bit from some of the senior engineering leaders inside the company, including Ray Ozzie and Jon DeVaan. A lot of great tools, processes, and accomplishments have been recognized over the years, and the bar is high, with great tools like Script#, Nikhil Kothari's famous C#/JavaScript tool, as well as Brad, Krzysztof, and Michael's FxCop (now built into Visual Studio). I hope that, with some of the plans I have in place for the framework, that maybe someday it'll be a finalist for a future award of this nature - there's a nice shiny crystal award that would look great on the bookshelf!

What's the Silverlight Unit Test Framework?

The Silverlight Unit Test Framework is a simple unit and functional test system specially designed for Silverlight, building on existing desktop unit testing knowledge and metadata. You'll find the test framework inside of the Silverlight Toolkit's source code package, and in use in a lot of places. Thanks for everyone helping to make this a success!