Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio® 2010

Chapter 7. Unit Testing with the Unit Test Framework

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Common concepts and benefits of unit testing

• Creating your first unit test using the Visual Studio unit testing framework

• Executing, managing, and viewing the results of unit tests

• Data-driven unit tests

• Testing non-public members from tests

• Generating test stubs from code

• Enabling code coverage and test impact analysis

Programmatic unit testing involves writing code to verify a system at a lower and more granular level than with other types of testing. It is used by programmers for programmers, and is quickly becoming standard practice at many organizations. All editions of Visual Studio 2010 (apart from the free Express editions) include unit testing features that are fully integrated with the IDE and with other features (such as reporting and source control). Developers no longer need to rely on third-party utilities (such as NUnit) to perform their unit testing, although they still have the option to use them.

This chapter describes the concepts behind unit testing, why it is important, and how to create effective unit test suites. You learn about the syntax of writing unit tests, and you will learn how to work with Visual Studio's integrated features for executing and analyzing those tests. The discussion then goes into more detail about the classes available to you when writing your unit tests, including the core Assert class and many important attributes. You will also see how easy it is to create data-driven ...