How to Write Unit Tests in .NET. Unit testing is the idea of writing a…
By: Joshua Howard
Tags: Programming, Coding, Dotnet, Test Driven Development, Testing

Unit testing is the idea of writing a separate set of code to automatically execute your production code and verify the results. It’s called a ‘unit’ test because the idea is that you are only testing a single ‘unit’ of code and not the entire application. Writing Unit Tests is often seen in Test Driven Development but can and should be used in any development environment.

Unit tests give your application increased testing coverage with very little over-head. Most unit tests can execute extremely fast which means you can write hundreds of them and execute them all relatively quickly. In environments with multiple developers, unit tests can provide a sanity check for other developers making changes to existing code. But how do we actually go about writing a unit test?

In .NET there’s a couple of ways we can do this. In Test Driven Development, you write your tests first. That sounds backwards but it’s really about teaching your mind to think a certain way before you start writing any code because to write unit tests, you need highly decoupled code with few dependencies. When you do have dependencies you’ll want to use Dependency Injection (which we can cover at another time).

The .NET stack provides a built in testing harness called MSTest. It gets the job done but doesn’t come with the bells and whistles. I personally prefer xUnit which can be downloaded as a Nuget package. There is also NUnit which is very similar but I prefer xUnit because each execution of a test is containerized where as in NUnit all tests are run in a single container.

So once we’ve installed xUnit we can start writing our first tests. The first thing to do is to create a new project in your solution. We can do this by opening up our project in Visual Studio and then right-clicking on our solution, choosing Add, and then new project. From the ‘Add a new project’ window we can search for ‘ xUnit Test Project ‘ and add that. I simply name the project ‘Test’ and click create.

By default a new class is created which contains your new test class. You should also see the ‘Test Explorer’ window in Visual Studio on the left-hand side. If you don’t, go to the ‘View’ menu and select it. This menu contains all of your tests that you write and allows you to run them all or run them individually. You can also kick off a single test to debug it.

Now the fun part, writing a test! Let’s keep it simple for starters and look at an example test:

[Fact]

public void ItCanAddTwoNumbers()

{

var result = AddTwoNumbers(1, 4);

Assert.Equal(5, result);

}

So this test is doing a couple of things. By defining [Fact] we are saying this function is a test function and not some other helper function. I try to name my test functions based around what the application is trying to do like, ‘ItCanAddTwoNumbers’ but that is completely up to you.

Within the test function we can then call the function we want to test which in this case is ‘AddTwoNumbers(int num1, int num2).’ Simply calling this function and making sure the application doesn’t crash or throw an error is already a little bit of test coverage which is great, but we can go farther. We can not only make sure it doesn’t error, we can make sure we get the right results back.

We can do this using ‘ Assert’ which gives us some different options for verifying the results are correct. In this case, our test will check to make sure the ‘result’ variable does equal 5. If it does, our test will pass with green colors. If not, our test will fail and show red in our Test Explorer. This is great when you already have some test written, you make some code changes, and then re-run all of your tests to make sure everything is still working correctly.

One last tip, instead of using [Fact] we can use [Theory] to allow us to pass in multiple test values quickly like this:

[Theory]

[InlineData(2)]

[InlineData(5)]

[InlineData(7)]

public void ItCanAddOneToANumber(int number)

{

var results = AddOneToNumber(number);

Assert.Equal(number + 1, results);

}

Hopefully this gives you a brief introduction into how to write Unit Tests in .NET using xUnit. Unit testing will save you hours of debugging and troubleshooting time when that sneaky bug shows up that you can’t quite track down. Even if the bug is not in your unit tests, it can help you track down the issue faster because you’ll know it’s not in any of your code that you have unit tests for.

Always test and happy coding!