Unit Test Projects and NUnit compatibility

I often need to write Unit Tests and have them accessible from NUnit as well as the Visual Studio Test View (etc), so I thought I’d write myself a walkthrough of the common things I have to do.

Firstly, whichever language I’m using, Visual Studio is normally configured to create the wrong one, so let’s say I’ve got my C# hat on and I create a test project:

Darn it, it’s created a VB.NET one, so I delete it and search for the setting or way I create a C# one. This can be located under Tools -> Options -> Test Tools -> Test Project, then choose your preference from the “Default test project language” dropdown, like so:

You will also notice you can choose what (if any) template test classes are created for you. 99% of the time I use Unit Test and that is it.
So you go back in and create the project again and it’s created a C# one, it automatically adds a reference to the Visual Studio Test classes, great:

Add a reference to NUnit, so you have:

Now let’s look at the Unit Test class, I’ve stripped it down to the bare bones:

using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;

namespace TestProject1
{
    [TestClass]
    public class UnitTest1
    {
        [TestMethod]
        public void TestMethod1()
        {
        }
    }
}

Since we don’t want the Visual Studio and the NUnit classes to conflict my approach is to take out the Visual Studio using statement like so:

using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;

namespace TestProject1
{
    [Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.TestClass]
    public class UnitTest1
    {
        [Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.TestMethod]
        public void TestMethod1()
        {
        }
    }
}

Now this will still work as before, but we can add NUnit in now too, like so:

using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using NUnit.Framework;

namespace TestProject1
{
    [Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.TestClass]
    [TestFixture]
    public class UnitTest1
    {
        [Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.TestMethod]
        [Test]
        public void TestMethod1()
        {
        }
    }
}

And proof of the pudding, Visual Studio:

NUnit:

This also reminds me, while I’m on the subject, to be able to open a Visual Studio project from within NUnit there is a setting you need to change, go to Tools -> Settings -> IDE Support -> Visual Studio and then tick the “Enable Visual Studio Support” checkbox, like so: