How to prevent expected exceptions from breaking the debug test run?

Question

When running MSTEST unit tests in debug mode, the execution stops in every expected exception that is thrown. My test looks like this

[TestMethod()]
[ExpectedException(typeof(ArgumentNullException))]
public void ShouldThrowExceptionWhenPassingNull()
{
    object data = null;
    target.CheckNull(data);
}

the target method looks like this:

public void CheckNull(object data)
{
    if (ReferenceEquals(null, data))
    {
        throw new ArgumentNullException("data");
    }
} // test run breaks here: ArgumentNullException was unhandled by user code

Answer 1

Did you try running the tests using ctrl-R ctrl-T instead of ctrl-R T? Refer to this link for reference.

EDIT If it's not a keyboard shortcut issue, then check out this link. You could try the following as noted there:

1. Disable "break on user unhandled exceptions" for the exception types you you are encountering here (via Debug -> Exceptions)
2. Disable "break on user unhandled exceptions" for all exceptions (via Debug -> Exceptions)
3. Disable "Just My Code"

Answer 2

@dcp's suggestion looks like it would work for MSTEST, but you might want to consider getting TestDriven.Net. I use it as a test runner almost exclusively and don't have this problem using the right-click "Run Tests in Debug" mode. In addition I find it to be more convenient than the built-in test runner in almost all circumstances.