C# – Unit testing internal methods in VS2017 .NET Standard library

.net-standardcunit testingvisual-studio-2017

I am currently playing around with the latest Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate by creating a .NET Standard 1.6 library. I am using xUnit to unit test my code and was wondering if you can still test internal methods in VS2017.

I remember that you could add a line in AssemblyInfo.cs class in VS2015 that would enable specified projects to see internal methods:

[assembly:InternalsVisibleTo("MyTests")]

As there is no AssemblyInfo.cs class in VS2017 .NET Standard projects, I was wondering if you can still unit test internal methods?

Best Answer

According to .NET docs for the InternalsVisibleToAttribute:

The attribute is applied at the assembly level. This means that it can be included at the beginning of a source code file, or it can be included in the AssemblyInfo file in a Visual Studio project.

In other words, you can simply place it in your own arbitrarily named .cs file, and it should work fine:

// some .cs file included in your project
using System.Runtime.CompilerServices;
[assembly:InternalsVisibleTo("MyTests")]

Related Solutions

C# “internal” access modifier when doing unit testing

Internal classes need to be tested and there is an assemby attribute:

using System.Runtime.CompilerServices;

[assembly:InternalsVisibleTo("MyTests")]

Add this to the project info file, e.g. Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs.

C# – Unit testing private methods in C#

You can use the PrivateObject class:

Class target = new Class();
PrivateObject obj = new PrivateObject(target);
var retVal = obj.Invoke("PrivateMethod");
Assert.AreEqual(expectedVal, retVal);

Note: PrivateObject and PrivateType are not available for projects targeting netcoreapp2.0 - GitHub Issue 366

Best Answer

Related Solutions

C# “internal” access modifier when doing unit testing

C# – Unit testing private methods in C#

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