How to write your unit tests to switch between NUnit and MSTest

On my current project I found it useful to use both NUnit and MsTest for unit testing. When using ReSharper for running unit tests, it just simply works better with NUnit, and on large scale projects NUnit tends to run faster. We would have just simply used NUnit for everything, but MSTest gave us a few bonuses out of the box that were hard to pass up. Namely code coverage (without having to shell out thousands of extra dollars for the privilege) and integrated tests into the build process. I’m one of those guys who wants the build to fail if the unit tests don’t pass. If they don’t pass, there’s no point in sending that build on to QA.

So making the build work with MsTest is easiest if you just create a unit test project in your solution. This adds the right references and project type Guids in the project file so that everything just automagically just works. Then (using NuGet of course) you add in NUnit. At the top of your test file, remove the using statements that refer to MsTest and replace it with the following:

#if NUNIT using NUnit.Framework; #else using TestFixture = Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.TestClassAttribute; using Test = Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.TestMethodAttribute; using TestFixtureSetUp = Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.TestInitializeAttribute; using SetUp = Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.TestInitializeAttribute; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting; #endif

Basically I’m taking the NUnit naming conventions, and redirecting them to MsTest. You can go the other way, of course. I only chose this direction because I had already written the tests as NUnit tests. NUnit and MsTest provide largely the same functionality with slightly differing class names. There’s few actual differences between then, and I have not run into them on this project so far.

To run the tests as NUnit tests, simply open up the project properties tab and add the compiler directive NUNIT. Remove it, and you’re back in MsTest land.

image

This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Justin Jones

New on Geeks with Blogs

  • We Won The One Award I Actually Care About

    Full Scale made the Inc. 5000 for the fifth year straight, the 12th listing across my three companies. Here is why the one award you cannot buy is worth stopping for.

  • Your Customers Build the Features Now

    I let a tool I liked sit dead for a year rather than build the features I wanted. An MCP server meant I never had to, and your customers can do the same to your product.

  • Get the Size of a Directory in Linux the Easy Way

    du -sh for the quick answer, ncdu for the cleanup, df for the disk itself: every command for checking directory size in Linux, plus why du and df never agree.

  • Vim Search and Replace: The Ultimate Guide

    One :%s command replaces every match in a file before a find dialog would even open. The Vim substitute patterns worth the muscle memory: flags, ranges, capture groups, and multi-file edits.