Determine if code is running as part of a unit test

Question

I've done this before - I had to hold my nose while I did it, but I did it. Pragmatism beats dogmatism every time. Of course, if there is a nice way you can refactor to avoid it, that would be great.

Basically I had a "UnitTestDetector" class which checked whether the NUnit framework assembly was loaded in the current AppDomain. It only needed to do this once, then cache the result. Ugly, but simple and effective.

Taking Jon's idea this is what I came up with -

using System;
using System.Reflection;

/// <summary>
/// Detect if we are running as part of a nUnit unit test.
/// This is DIRTY and should only be used if absolutely necessary 
/// as its usually a sign of bad design.
/// </summary>    
static class UnitTestDetector
{

    private static bool _runningFromNUnit = false;      

    static UnitTestDetector()
    {
        foreach (Assembly assem in AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies())
        {
            // Can't do something like this as it will load the nUnit assembly
            // if (assem == typeof(NUnit.Framework.Assert))

            if (assem.FullName.ToLowerInvariant().StartsWith("nunit.framework"))
            {
                _runningFromNUnit = true;
                break;
            }
        }
    }

    public static bool IsRunningFromNUnit
    {
        get { return _runningFromNUnit; }
    }
}

Pipe down at the back we're all big enough boys to recognise when we're doing something we probably shouldn't ;)

Adapted from Ryan's answer. This one is for the MS unit test framework.

The reason I need this is because I show a MessageBox on errors. But my unit tests also test the error handling code, and I don't want a MessageBox to pop up when running unit tests.

/// <summary>
/// Detects if we are running inside a unit test.
/// </summary>
public static class UnitTestDetector
{
    static UnitTestDetector()
    {
        string testAssemblyName = "Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework";
        UnitTestDetector.IsInUnitTest = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies()
            .Any(a => a.FullName.StartsWith(testAssemblyName));
    }

    public static bool IsInUnitTest { get; private set; }
}

And here's a unit test for it:

    [TestMethod]
    public void IsInUnitTest()
    {
        Assert.IsTrue(UnitTestDetector.IsInUnitTest, 
            "Should detect that we are running inside a unit test."); // lol
    }

Simplifying Ryan's solution, you can just add the following static property to any class:

    public static readonly bool IsRunningFromNUnit = 
        AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies().Any(
            a => a.FullName.ToLowerInvariant().StartsWith("nunit.framework"));

I use a similar approach as tallseth

This is the basic code which could be easily modified to include caching. Another good idea would be to add a setter to IsRunningInUnitTest and call UnitTestDetector.IsRunningInUnitTest = false to your projects main entry point to avoid the code execution.

public static class UnitTestDetector
{
    public static readonly HashSet<string> UnitTestAttributes = new HashSet<string> 
    {
        "Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.TestClassAttribute",
        "NUnit.Framework.TestFixtureAttribute",
    };
    public static bool IsRunningInUnitTest
    {
        get
        {
            foreach (var f in new StackTrace().GetFrames())
                if (f.GetMethod().DeclaringType.GetCustomAttributes(false).Any(x => UnitTestAttributes.Contains(x.GetType().FullName)))
                    return true;
            return false;
        }
    }
}