Unit Testing C# Synchronous Methods

When you need to unit test a method, you should check happy path (for example, the method returns a resulting value) and sad path (the method throws exception). Here I describe a basic usage of unit testing with Visual Studio 2017 and xUnit version 2.2.

The code being tested:

1. Check successful result (happy path) – it’s very straightforward.

2. Check fail when the method throws an exception (sad path)

If you have faced with MSTest, you might remember [ExpectedException] attribute. In this case MSTest waits for a particular exception would be thrown in a whole unit test method, but not in a specific line of code. Modern unit test frameworks have more graceful capabilities to catch the exception.

2.1. Using Throws<>

But this approach combines Act and Assert phases of unit test in one line of code. Richard Banks suggested a better way in his article Stop Using Assert.Throws in Your BDD Unit Tests.

2.2. Using Record.Exception

At first, I check that the exception was really caught, then check the type of that exception.

Next time I’ll tell about unit testing the asynchronous methods.

CategoriesC#

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