nUnit GUI and Debugging in Visual Studio

This is just a short note to help people debug their unit tests a little easier. To most people this will probably seem pretty obvious but since I don't spend a ton of time in the VS environment I thought it was pretty nifty (and it saved me from having to buy something like TestDriven.Net - which rocks btw).

Basically what I needed was a way to debug my unit tests with the visual studio debugger. This is actually pretty easy to accomplish. Just follow these easy steps:

1. Set your test project as the default project. To do that just right click on the project name in the Solution Explorer pane and choose "Set as Default"
2. Set the projects "Start Action" to launch the nUnit Gui. To do that right click on the project in the Solution Explorer, Select the "DEBUG" tab, then click the radio button labeled "Start External Program" - then pick the nUnit Gui Runner as the external program.

Now, you can run your test suite. By clicking the run icon in the Visual Studio toolbar the nUnit Gui Runner will popup but no tests will run automatically - however the Gui Runner will be populated with all the tests in your project. Now you just need to pick the test(s) you want to run and run them. If those tests (or the code they call) have any break points the Visual Studio window will reactivate when the breakpoint is reached and you can step through your code.

I hope this helps others embrace unit tests with .Net and Visual Studio.