NUnit vs Team System Unit Test

Question

Which do you prefer?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of each for Unit Testing?

EDIT: I will admit that Team System offers a lot more than just Unit Testing, such as performance and load testing of applications and databases. This question was centering around writing unit tests and which do you prefer.

Answer 1

One very specific reason, is that NUnit won't tie you to the professional edition of the visual studio.

Update: Here is a link about unit testing support on Professional edition in vs 2008: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb385902.aspx

Answer 2

Nunit:

Advantages:

• Free
• Very similar to team system in attributs and methods for assertion, some names are even the same

Disadvantages:

• Tests must be run via console or external application ( this can be seen as an advantage, but not from my point of view).

Team System testing

Advantages:

• A part of VS, you can run tests in a test window.
• If you run a team system server you can run tests more easily as a part of the automated build

Disadvantages:

• Expensive
• Still isn't as stable as NUnit

A comparison between team system and Nunit

We use team system 2008 as we are gold certified partners to microsoft, but earlier used Nunit due to bug related issues in VS 2005. I prefer the VS solution.

Both are good solutions for your work, look also out for other free solutions like:

Good alternatives to Team System

Answer 3

When using MS Tests, you can use CHESS:

CHESS is a tool for systematically testing multithreaded code. Given a concurrent test, CHESS systematically drives the test along all possible thread interleavings.

Also, I found a nice comparison here that claims MS Tests are a little slower than NUnit, but I didn't check it myself.

Answer 4

One other advantage of NUnit is that it doesn't require that you add anything to your test classes. MSTest requires the presence of a TestContext property. We started out with MSTest but converted to NUnit. I also find NUnit to be significantly faster and I prefer ReSharper's test runner UI.

Answer 5

Doesn't Visual Studio 2008 allow you to use other testing frameworks when you create the test project? I vaguely remember this from watching the old MVC Framework videos back when Hanselman was doing the preview 2 or 3 videos.

This would allow you to use any testing framework you like and still be able to use it in your VS2008 IDE.

Answer 6

Currently NUnit has test categories that allow you to run unit tests separately from slower integration tests.

MS Tests has no such built-in mechanism.

Answer 7

What about testing private methods. Team System create automatically shadow accessors using reflections - does NUnit same?

Answer 8

There is always tools like ReSharper and TestDriven.NET. They will let you run tests from Visual Studio