Windows Developer Power Tools

10.3 Writing Advanced Unit Tests with MbUnit

Most .NET developers are (or should be!) familiar with NUnit or the Visual Studio Team System unit-test framework. Both of these frameworks give developers powerful tools to create, run, and manage unit testing for their software. However, NUnit has no support for row-driven testing, and neither framework supports automatically generating large amounts of input data when you need to test multiple values in multiple parameters against each other. Database testing under NUnit or Team System testing is difficult because you have to manage transactions and rollbacks on your own.

Tip

Row-driven testing lets you define a table of input data and expected return values. The testing framework has infrastructure in place to read the data and pass it one row at a time through your test methods.

MbUnit shines in these areas, and it has many other unique features than can ease testing pains for developers: it gives you the ability to run test asserts against arrays, utilize reflection in your tests, and even read in data from XML files.

MbUnit at a Glance
Tool	MbUnit
Version covered	2.3
Home page	http://www.mbunit.org
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/29
Summary	Extensible unit-test framework with impressive support for data-driven, combinatorial, and other testing types. Many unique features distinguish it from other test frameworks.
License ...