Visual Studio Unittest Inheritance

As your project thus your unittests grow and get more complex you might have to use every Object Oriented "trick" in the book to keep your UnitTests lean/mean/fast and flexible. Of course you don't want any redundant (unittest)code so applying inheritance to your unittests might seem a natural step (especially with provider/Inversion Of Control/Plugins beging used more and more).

Inheritance of UnitTests for Visual Studio however, still, is only partly supported by Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 (all editions). You can't define your baseclass/derivedclass in seperate assemblies.

To me this is a big limitation and the "obvious" solutions offered by Microsoft (copy/paste or add twice) for me are no option. I rather go for sharing in my version control system.

Just an other example of why UnitTesting as offered by Visual Studio so far "feels" a bit unmature. Speaking of which: the atrributename of "fixture" is so much more right then "testmethod"...

======== From MSDN =============

A test class is any class that is marked with the TestClass attribute. Test classes can now inherit members from other test classes. This means that you can create reusable tests in base test classes; derived test classes can inherit tests from base test classes. This feature eliminates duplicated test code and gives developers more flexibility while unit-testing production code.
A test class cannot inherit from a class that is in a different assembly. You can circumvent this limitation in the following way:

• Define your base test class in a source code file and add the file to Project A.
• Add the same source code file to a different project, Project B. To do this, right-click the project in Solution Explorer, click Add, click Existing Item, and then use the Add Existing Item dialog box to select the file.
  Although Project B builds into a different assembly, it includes the base test class. Other test classes in Project B can inherit from that base test class

===============================


For more information:

Visual Studio 2005: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919649
Visual Studio 2008: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182516.aspx

Happy Testing!