Unit test, NUnit or Visual studio? [closed]

Solution 1:

NUnit has few advantages over MS-Test

1. Suite attribute - can aggregate tests and execute them separately (useful for large projects with fast and slow tests for example)
2. Readable Assert method, e.g. Assert.AreEqual(expected, actual) vs Assert.That(actual, Is.EqualTo(expected))
3. NUnit has frequent version updates - MS-Test has only one per VS version.
4. Many integrated runners including Resharper and TestDriven.NET
5. Expected exception message assertion - can be done using attribute in NUnit but must be done using Try-Catch in MS-Test
6. [TestCase]! NUnit allows for parameter-ized tests.

Solution 2:

From my current perspective (after 8 months of development with about 10 developers on average) I would advise against using MSTest for the following reasons

• The framework in itself is quite slow. I don't mean the test code that you write - that's under your control. I mean the framework running those tests is slow, whether it's running a test suite, single tests etc.
• The need to keep a Test-Metadata file which always leads to complications when several developers are working on it (recreating e.g. the metadata etc.). Every other test suite doesn't need a metadata file. It is kind of nice to organize your tests but you can achieve the same through namespaces, classes and method names.
• Doing Continuous Integration, if you want to run unit tests on your build machine you will need to install Visual Studio on that machine.

In other words, if I would have to decide again 8 months ago, I would probably take NUnit. I may not have the integrated test results report, but developers would have a more seamless testing experience.