Preconditions

• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 (can be obtained for free). This is the only supported version of framework right now
• Unit-testing framework: NUnit 2.4.x (can be obtained for free). I've tested Nester against 2.4.2, but I believe it should works with other versions as well

Preparing you solution for mutation

1. Create a copy of your source code base. Nester is supposed to have read-only access there, but with Alpha version it is better to be on the safe side
2. Open you solution in Visual Studio 2005 (convert it from the previous version if necessary)
3. Build Release configuration
4. Run your unit-tests

Running Nester

1. Download Nester.zip
2. Unpack the content of the archive into target folder
3. Copy nunit.core.dll and nunit.core.interfaces.dll from your NUnit installation to Nester target folder
4. Make sure that your .NET Framework folder (%SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727) is in %PATH%, so Nester can run msbuild.exe. If not, please add it via Control Panel/System/Advanced/Environment Variables. See this tutorial for details
5. Run Nester.exe

Check out this presentation, created with Wink - it should give you some overview of basic functionality

Nester.exe.config options

Key	Default value	Description
ReportKilledMutations	true	Report information about tried and killed mutations. If false Nester will use run tests until first failure
ClearReadOnlyFlag	true	Automatically clear read-only flags from sources
UnitTestTimeOut	5000	If unit test execution time is exceeded specified timeout, Nester considers tests as failed. Put here 0 if you want to switch of the timeout
DetectAssertions	true	Try to detect Debug.Assert()
BuildConfiguration	Release	Specify whenever Nester should build Debug or Release configuration
shadowfiles.path		Path where NUnit AppDomain will do shadow copy