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We have a WinForms application that we're planning to port to Silverlight. Obviously the UI will need to be totally rewritten, but we have a lot of business logic that's well-tested with NUnit tests. We use ReSharper to run the tests inside the IDE, and nunit-console to run the tests on the continuous integration machines.

As we start moving our business-logic classes into Silverlight assemblies, how do we get these unit tests to run against those Silverlight assemblies? My understanding is that NUnit can't run Silverlight tests without significant tweaking, and said tweaking (in the form of a project template) appears to be VS2008- and Silverlight 3-specific (we'll most likely be using VS2010 and Silverlight 4 for our port).

We can move our tests to another testing framework if that's the best option, but there doesn't seem to be much else besides NUnit. The Silverlight Unit Test Framework looks like it runs inside the browser, which is a non-starter for continuous integration.

I'm aware that Silverlight 4.0 assemblies can be loaded into a .NET 4.0 executable, but I'm unsure of what this means for unit testing. Would it work to compile our business-logic assembly as a Silverlight 4.0 DLL, and write a full-framework .NET 4.0 NUnit test assembly that references the Silverlight DLL? It seems like this might work, but has anyone done this successfully with unit tests?

Bottom line, what should we do for our unit tests? We need a solution that

  • still lets us run tests in the ReSharper test runner;
  • can also be run from the command line;
  • works in VS2010.

We don't instantiate any UI objects in our tests, so those pesky DependencyObject threading issues aren't a concern. We just need to test our Silverlight business logic.

+1  A: 

Not sure if NUnit is supported or how difficult it would be to add, but you might check out http://AGunit.codeplex.com for ReSharper Silverlight support.

I wrote a little tool to C.I. silverlight tests and attempt to help in normal dev/tdd scenarios - you can go check out http://StatLight.codeplex.com.

You should be able to find an NUnit build for silverlight out there (there's a few). Not sure of any runners that work with NUnit in the browser. However StatLight can run some basic NUnit functionality for you.

Hope this gives you a little help.

Jason Jarrett