Now that the .NET 8.0 preview is out, many folks will want to experiment with it and possibly run tests under the TestCentric GUI. A newly released extension, the .NET 8.0 Pluggable Agent, makes this possible.

Briefly, it's a special type of extension to the TestCentric Engine, which provides a new type of agent to run tests. In this case, an agent capable of running tests under .NET 8.0.

Like the NUnit engine on which it is based, the TestCentric Engine is extensible. It supports the standard NUnit extensions defined by the NUnit API but it also provides additional extension points. A pluggable agent extension makes use of one of these, extending the engine to provide a new kind of agent. In this case, an agent which runs tests under .NET 8.0 is provided.

The benefit of having pluggable agents is that new agents can be added to an existing installation of the GUI, without waiting for a new release. In this case, assuming you are running the latest alpha release of the gui, version 2.0.0-alpha7, you can simply install the extension and TestCentric will be able to run .NET 8.0 tests.

The initial preview of the .NET 8.0 pluggable agent is available on the TestCentric myget feed. Use the latest dev build you can find there. The package nunit-extension-net80-pluggable-agent is for use with Chocolatey. For other types of installations, use NUnit.Extension.Net80PluggableAgent;

Make sure that you install the extension using the same package type you used to install the GUI. If you installed the GUI using chocolatey, install the extension in the same way. If you used a NuGet package for the GUI, use NuGet for the extension as well.