NUnit through Visual Studio

As you may know Visual Studio (VS) has quite nice integration with MSTest projects.  It has a test list editor and view that allow you to see the tests in the solution and choose which to run.  If any fail you can debug through the tests using the VS debugger.

However, as you may have gathered from previous posts we are using NUnit, basically beacause we don't want to buy an extra VS licence for our automated build machine (yes, thanks Microsoft for not including MSTest in the .NET SDK!).

Thankfully, I have disovered a nice add in for VS called NUnitForVS.  This allows NUnit tests to be run and debugged in the same way that MSTest projects are.

Through my install I did discover a couple of issues:

1) You have to manually edit the NUnit Test projects .csproj file to contain a ProjectTypeGuid element.  The one specified on the linked website did not work with VS 2008, so I checked one of my MSTest projects and found the following value which did work...

‹ProjectTypeGuid› {3AC096D0-A1C2-E12C-1390-A8335801FDAB};{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}‹ProjectTypeGuid›

2) My Unit Tests didn't appear at first in the Test View.  You have to rebuild the software for it to recalculate the list.

Hint - For ease, I have added a new template project for NUnit tests.   This was created as a Class Library, but I have manually edited the .csproj file to contain the ProjectTypeGuid element I mentioned above.