Question

I have unit tests defined for my Visual Studio 2008 solution. These tests are defined in multiple methods and in multiple classes across several files.

I’ve read in a blog article that when using MSTest, it is a mistake to think that you can depend on the order of execution of your tests:

Execution Interleaving: Since each instance of the test class is instantiated separately on a different thread, there are no guarantees
regarding the order of execution of unit tests in a single class, or
across classes. The execution of tests may be interleaved across
classes, and potentially even assemblies, depending on how you chose
to execute your tests. The key thing here is – all tests could be
executed in any order, it is totally undefined.

That said, I have to have a pre-execution step before any of these tests gets to run. That is, I actually want to define an order of execution somehow. For example, 1) first create the database; 2) test that it’s created; then 3) run the remaining 50 tests in arbitrary order.

Any ideas on how I can do that?

Answer 1

I wouldn’t test that the database is successfully created; I will assume that all subsequent tests will fail if it is not, and it feels in a way that you would be testing the test code.

Regarding a pre-test step to set up the database, you can do that by creating a method and decorating it with the ClassInitialize attribute. That will make the test framework execute that method prior to any other method within the test class:

[ClassInitialize()]
public static void InitializeClass(TestContext testContext) 
{ 
    // your init code here
}