How to log errors, messages in a NUnit unit test?

Question

There are several tabs in GUI runner of NUnit:

I understand that using Console.WriteLine (...) shows the messages in "Console.Out" tab. My question is what other tabs are for and how can I log messages to them?

[EDIT]

I apologise as I realise that my original question wasn't clear enough. What I intend to do is that create an extensive result report once all unit test cases are executed. So I was exploring the way various messages that can be logged while a test is run. I am looking forward to creating a result report like:

==== TEST1 starts ====
Start Time: 2009-03-26 11:15:13 AM
Checking operation 1....OK
Checking value of variable "X": 52.56....OK
End Time: 2009-03-26 11:15:19 AM
Time taken to execute test: 0.00:00:06.000

==== TEST2 starts ====
.
.

Any suggestion how can I achieve this?

Answer 1

Settings for the tabs are in the NUnit options - see the docs here.

For instance, if you check Display Console Error Output then that tab will display text written to Console.Error by your tests.

Answer 2

Sample:

    Assert.AreNotEqual(0, result.Count);
     [exec]
     [exec] Tests run: 11, Failures: 1, Not run: 0, Time: 50.422 seconds
     [exec]
     [exec] Failures:
     [exec] 1) Domain.UnitTest.ManagerTest.TestEmbeddedIndex
 :   Expected: not 0
     [exec]   But was:  0
     [exec]

Is this what you are looking for?
Assert is very extensive. On fail of one of the conditions Nunit throws an error.

Assert.AreEqual(),Assert.AreSame(), Assert.Contains(),Assert.Fail();

Additionally Nunit has things like

[ExpectedException] 

Dig into the documentation to learn more..

---

Based on the Edit update:
If I were you I would do this as part of the build mechanism. In nant I’d do something like this…

<target name="setup" description="Initializes test properties">
    <echo message="Sucessfully initialized tests" />
</target>

Showing console messages after every [Test] is a bad idea IMHO. It delays the tests which counts when you run 1000’s of them. Tests are meant to be blazingly fast.