Unit Tester

Overview

Unit Tester provides a small, simple to use, testing framework that can be used with all flavours of Visual Studio.

The Unit Tester component is designed to provide developers with a simple mechanism to test their code in defined "units" of functionality. In most cases a unit of functionality will refer to a single class, however it does not have to, a class may have several unit tests created for it.

The Unit Tester component defines the code that tests a unit of functionality as a "Test Case". A test case typically contains methods that test the functionality of the members of a class. When unit testing a component that has many classes there will be many test cases to run. Each test case can be run individually or alternatively the Unit Tester provides a "Test Suite" that can be used to contain, manage and run many test cases.

To use the Unit Tester component in a typical development scenario, create a solution that contains the project e.g. a class library that you are developing, add a Windows Forms project to the solution to act as a test harness. In the test harness, add a reference to the Unit Tester component. For each class in the class library project, create a class in the test harness that derives from the Unit Tester TestCase abstract base class. In each TestCase derived class, create the test methods that the Unit Tester component is to execute as part of the test case. Create code in the test harness Form that either instantiates and runs each test case individually or adds each of the test cases to an instance of the Unit Tester TestSuite class.

Features

The Unit Tester component includes the following features:

• Can be used with any flavour of Visual Studio but does not depend on it, so Unit Tester can be used with any .Net development tool.
• Once created a test case may be run individually or as part of a test suite containing many test cases
• A test suite may be executed once, executed a specified number of times or executed for a specified period of time.
• A test suite may be executed synchronously or asynchronously. A progress event is implemented by both the TestCase and the TestSuite classes to provide feedback during a long test run.
• The TestCase base class is derived from the static Assert class, therefore coding assertions in test methods is very simple and intuitive.
• Each test method in a test case may specify the result that it is expected to produce. By comparing the expected result with the actual result in the result report it is easy to spot problems or errors.
• The results of a test run are compiled into a report. A test result report may contain the name of each test method called and completed, comments added by the code in the test method, the result expected from the test method and details of any exceptions that were thrown by the member being tested. The content and appearance of a test run result report can be customized using the TestResultFormatter class.
• The results of a test run may be output to any TextWriter derived destination, e.g. the Console or a file.
• Comes with MSDN style help reference documentation detailing all of the types contained in the Unit Tester component and their members. Sample code, in C# and Visual Basic is included to demonstrate how to call and use the core types and their members.
• Comes with two sample Visual Studio solutions, one in C# and one in Visual Basic demonstrating how to use the Unit Tester component.