Testing Internal Methods

Over on the Windojitsu blog, Shawn has come up with a minimalist alternative to NUnit. The main reason given is not wanting to inflict a dependency on anyone who wants to build his project.

TestDriven.NET already supports the idea of light weight testing frameworks. These frameworks can be invisible to the outside world (non-public) and conditionaly compiled out. They can be used if you want to test internal classes/methods or if you don't want a dependency on the 'nunit.framework' assembly.

Here is an example framework, quite similar to the one Shawn defined.

#if TEST
namespace Testing.Framework
{
 using System;
 
 [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class)]
 internal class TestFixtureAttribute : Attribute { }
 
 [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Method)]
 internal class TestAttribute : Attribute { }
}
#endif 

You can then write your unit tests as follows (note that classes and methods are internal and private by default).

#if TEST
namespace Testing.Framework
{
 using System;
 using Testing.Framework;

 [TestFixture]
 class TestFix
 {
 [Test] void TestUnit()
 {
 throw new Exception("Boom!");
 }
 }
}
#endif

Remember to define a TEST conditional compilation constant in your Debug builds!

Update: Gus pointed out that "Unused referenced assemblies don't actually stick around". If you are disciplined enough to wrap all of your tests in #if TEST blocks - any referenced 'nunit.framework' assembly won't be referenced in the final output. If you use the above method and conditionaly compile out the framework itself, any tests that reference it won't compile if TEST isn't defined (you don't have to count on discipline).

I'm not saying that light weight testing frameworks are a good thing (otherwize I would have blogged about them before). They are however a thing and if you need them (or are paranoid) they're supported. ;o)