Visual-studio – Unit testing in Visual Studio 2008 Standard

unit testingvisual-studio-2008

I am using Visual Studio 2008 standard editing for my personal projects. This edition does not support unit testing out of the box. I have some experience with the test possibilities in Visual Studio Team System.

What (free) options do I have if I want to do unit testing? Is it possible to open the test projects made with Microsoft test by others?

Best Answer

I am using NUnit with Visual Studio 2008. In the past I have also used it with Visual Studio 2005.

It works great.

For running it I use a project where the unit tests are defined, separate from the main project. For interactive use I then set this project to the default project (right-click on project/Set as Startup Project) and set Properties/Debug/"Start external program" in this project to something like

C:\Program Files\NUnit\bin\nunit-x86.exe

In the same screen "Start Options/Command line arguments" is set to something like

..\..\..\temp2\MSQlib1,2008-03-14a.nunit"\MSQlib1,2008-03-14a.nunit

This points to the NUnit project file ("MSQlib1,2008-03-14a.nunit" in this example)- the ".."s are due to being relative to the bin\Debug folder where the DLL for the project is located (the application is this case is the NUnit GUI application) and which will be the current directory when debugging is started.

The result is that the NUnit GUI application is started when F5 is pressed in Visual Studio and calls back into the application when the unit tests are run from the NUnit GUI application.

This allows breakpoints to be set in the unit tests (if needed). E.g. to get information on why a unit test failed by doing inspection with the debugger. In my case this has sometimes been necessary when the mass of elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulphur were changed slightly and masses of amino acids no longer were within limits.

Related Solutions

Visual-studio – How to run Test projects with Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition

Try Gallio as explained best in this blog post by Richard Dingwall, and for Visual Studio support, use TestDriven.Net to runs it.

There's some information available in this Google Groups post as well.

From Gallio's website:

At present Gallio can run tests from MbUnit versions 2 and 3, MSTest, NBehave, NUnit, xUnit.Net, and csUnit. Gallio provides tool support and integration with CCNet, MSBuild, NAnt, NCover, Pex, Powershell, Resharper, TestDriven.Net, TypeMock, and Visual Studio Team System.

C# – Beginners introduction to unit testing in Visual Studio 2008

You don't specify which flavor of VS2008 you are using. If it is Pro or above, then MSTest is bundled, but a lot of people have issues with it - it isn't always very intuitive, and it takes far too much setup to do simple things like coverage / file deployment.

A walkthrough is here.

As a recommendation, I suggest using VS2008 with NUnit (free) and TestDriven.NET (not free). It takes away all the pain, allowing you to just write simple things like:

[TestFixture]
public class Foo {
    [Test]
    public void Bar() {
        Assert.AreEqual(2, 1+1);
    }
}

Then just right-click (on the class, on the method, on the project, on the solution) and use the Test options that TestDriven.NET provides, including (if you have MSTest) "Test With -> Team Coverage", which runs your NUnit tests with the MSTest coverage tools, including giving the colorization back into the IDE to show which lines executed. No messing with "testrunconfig" and the other files that MSTest wants you to use.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Visual-studio – How to run Test projects with Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition

C# – Beginners introduction to unit testing in Visual Studio 2008

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