NUnit SetUpFixture attribute equivalent in xUnit?

Question

In nUnit, SetUpFixture allowed me to run some code before any tests. Is there anything like that when using xUnit?

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From nUnit documentation:

This is the attribute that marks a class that contains the one-time setup or teardown methods for all the test fixtures under a given namespace.

Answer 1

xUnit's comparison table shows that where you would use [TestFixtureSetUp] in NUnit, you make your test fixture class implement IUseFixture<T>.

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If [TestFixtureSetUp] isn't the attribute you're looking for, then the header at the beginning of the compatibility table indicates that there is no equivalent:

Note: any testing framework attributes that are not in this list have no corresponding attribute in xUnit.net.

Answer 2

This was covered on the xunit forum in this discussion. (And most recently in this question)

Answer 3

Actually, the setup and tear-down is mentioned in the book "The Art of Unit Testing", which says that the attribute is called "[SetUp]" and not "[SetUpFixture]", which is not listed in the comparison table anyway.

So... for the "[SetUp]" attribute, the xUnit.net equivalent is just to use a constructor. The corresponding comment says:

'We believe that use of [SetUp] is generally bad. However, you can implement a parameterless constructor as a direct replacement. See Note 2. '

Further down, Note 2 says:

Note 2: The xUnit.net team feels that per-test setup and teardown creates difficult-to-follow and debug testing code, often causing unnecessary code to run before every single test is run.