Lazycoder

Anyone with test framework experience?

Anyone out there with .NET test framework experience want to elighten me?

Which one actually WORKS?

MBUnit, the current favorite amongst the people I read, can’t even load it’s own tests in it’s GUI test runner (at least on my machineS). Let alone run my tests. The documentation consists of a confusing wiki and blog posts professing undying love for the framework. I’d love to pitch in, in the spirit of Open Source, and try to fill in the documentation holes, but who wants to spend a lot of time reflecting over something when there are alternatives out there that are better documented? Heck, I’m just getting my feet wet in this TDD world.

Visual Studio Team System unit testing – works about as well as the rest of Visual Studio. Which means it ALMOST works, but will occasionally just barf up something neat like “Cannot find .Net framework 2.0. blah blah” (which is apparently due to adding references to projects rather than assemblies AND having ClickOnce security enabled. ) Or it won’t let me RUN the tests. Seriously, the little “play” button is disabled in the “test results” window and I can figure out how to enable it. I’ll say this for MBUnit, it’s still documented better than the unit testing is VSTM.

NUnit – comes the closest, except it sometimes won’t load my test projects for some reason. I get a “System.IO.FileNotFound” exception complaining about how it can’t load the project or one of it’s dependencies. *I* can find them all, why can’t NUnit? Then it failed my one and only test, a constructor test. The whole test was two lines amounting to “thing target = new thing(); Assert.IsNotNull(target);”. I got a threading exception. (It looks like it had to do with my overriding the EditingControlShowing event in the DataGridView to enable Autocomplete in some combo boxes in the DataGridView. The exception was a threading exception, telling me to make sure I had [STAThread] in my Main function, which I did. Oddly enough, my only other constructor test, which tested a control in the same namespace also containing a DataGridView with combo boxes that I was manually setting the autocomplete on, would not throw an exception).

Of course, Visual Studio doesn’t recognize any of the other testing frameworks. The NUnit GUI would recognize the VSTM tests, but wouldn’t show any of it’s own tests if the assembly contained VSTM tests. Nice.

Maybe I’m going about this all wrong, maybe you aren’t supposed to test constructors and properties and what not? Maybe you aren’t supposed to use GUI test runners. How can I trust that my unit tests are testing correctly if the testing frameworks aren’t even stable enough to run?