Debugging Nunit Tests inside VS2010 Express

Question

I have written a bunch of unit tests inside VS2010 Express and tests being tests they sometimes fail. Since the express editions of VS don't allow plugins to run I can't simply spin up TestDriven.Net or an equivalent and debug the tests. To try and work around this I've converted my test assembly into a console app and made the main method look like this:

class CrappyHackToDebugUnitTestInVSExpress
{
  public static void Main()
  {
     AppDomain.CurrentDomain.ExecuteAssemblyByName(
          @"C:\Program Files\NUnit 2.5.5\bin\net-2.0\nunit-console.exe",
          new [] { Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location, "/framework:4.0" });
  }
}

In theory I should be able to run this up, set break points in my test. If it worked it would be an acceptable work around, but I keep getting the following:

FileLoadException
Could not load file or assembly 'C:\\Program Files\\NUnit 2.5.5\\bin\\net-2.0\\nunit-console.exe' 
or one of its dependencies. The given assembly name or codebase was invalid. 
(Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131047)

Now the file exists and when run manually nunit-console runs fine. What might be my problem?

Answer 1

Basically you need to convert your assembly to Windows Forms app, add reference to the nunit-gui-runner.dll assembly and change your Main method to look like this:

    [STAThread]
    static void Main()
    {
        NUnit.Gui.AppEntry.Main(new string[] { Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location });
    }

here is another example:

...
using NUnit.Gui;

namespace __libs
{
    class Program
    {
        [STAThread]
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            NUnit.Gui.AppEntry.Main(new string[] { @"C:\test\bin\Debug\test.exe" });
        }
    }
}

This will allow you to step into certain tests but is not very good for a red green cycle, so you will want to use this only when debugging and not in other circumstances.