SOAtest 5.5 adds integration with Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System (VSTS). That means that the results of tests made on SOAP messages service definitions will now populate the VSTS pane. It follows ParaSoft’s existing integration of display of results form its C# testing tools.
However, the integration with VSTS is at this point partial; for now, if you want to create and edit tests of SOAP messages, you will have to toggle back into ParaSoft’s tool. Full integration of ParaSoft’s SOAtest in Visual Studio is on the longer term product roadmap.
The new release also extends support for Windows Communications Foundation (WCF), the key SOA framework for the new Vista platform. WCF is, in effect, a declarative services fabric which enables developers to specify the creation of web services. Beside supporting a set of Oasis standards (the actual stack that Microsoft supports is often called WS-*), SOAtest also supports the proprietary communications protocols used for exchanging web services spawned internally through .NET applications. Parasoft claims to offer the first regression tests for web services spawned through WCF.
Other enhancements to SOAtest are incremental. They included expanded support for creating stubs, which are simulated web services. SOAtest already supports creating stubs, but until now you had to create the stub: of a web service manually. Now, SOAtest has automated the process of generating the simulated web services against which you target SOAP messages.
SOAtest 5.5 is available now.
