Question

I’m moderately new to test frameworks and I have been reading up on Moq and this introductory post used a way of organising tests that I had not seen before. Further research shows that we in the .Net world tend to meld the terms BDD and Context/Specification (CS) Testing. I don’t want to get into that argument – I am primarily interested in achieving this style of writing test classes.

This article shows the approach again and makes explicit the use of a base class that allows us to construct our specification through the test framework.

This issue I have is that I cannot see an instance method under MSTest that would allow a test fixture to be initialised just once for each test. The best I can see is the constructor of the test class but that feels a bit wrong. In NUnit one could use [TestFixtureSetup]. Is there an equivalent using Visual Studio’s built in test framework?

Edit
I’ve subsequently moved to NUnit which provides the flexibility I require.

Answer 1

After some investigation I have moved to using NUnit. There are several reasons for preferring NUnit over MSTest but, with regards to this particular issue, the compelling reason is that the only class-wide initialisation method supported by MSTest (that doesn’t run for every test) is for static methods which is not what I’m looking for.

As Jason points out [ClassInitialise] will provide this static, class wide initialisation in MSTest. There isn’t really a way of mimicking the behavior of [TextFixtureSetup] found in NUnit such that an instance method is run once before any test in the fixture is run.