Windows Developer Power Tools

10.1 Unit Testing Your Code with NUnit

Creating unit tests for your code is an excellent way to improve its quality. Unit tests also aid in the design of usable classes and APIs. Unit tests provide a set of easy-to-run automatic checks on your code that help keep it working as you make changes.

NUnit, written by Charlie Poole, Mike Two, James Newkirk, and Alexei Vorontsov, is an open source tool that allows you to write and run unit tests. NUnit provides an API for creating test classes in any .NET language, as well as both console and GUI runners for running your tests.

NUnit at a Glance
Tool	NUnit
Version covered	2.2
Home page	http://www.nunit.org
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/27
Summary	A tool for writing and running unit tests in .NET code
License type	Custom (based on zlib/libpng license)
Online resources	Mailing list, forums, bug tracker, and an incredible wealth of blog posts and articles
Supported Frameworks	.NET 1.0, 1.1, 2.0; Mono
Related tools in this book	NUnit Code Snippets, MbUnit, NCover, Zanebug, TestDriven.NET, NUnitForms

Getting Started

Windows Installers are available for .NET 1.1, .NET 2.0, and Mono. Download the appropriate Windows Installer from the Download section of the NUnit web site. After running the installer, create a new Class Library project in Visual Studio and add a reference to nunit.framework.dll to the project. The NUnit DLLs are added to the ...