Why would anyone use MSTest over NUnit?

Choices, choices, choices. The advantage of having a thriving open-source community in the .Net world is that you have choices…the disadvantage is that you have to actually make them. Selecting a unit-testing framework is an important step, and can have far-reaching effects across your organization and over the lifetime of your products. Complicating things further, you must also decide whether you want to trust an open-source solution, or go with what Microsoft offers out-of-the-box. Given that Microsoft only provides one solution for unit testing, MSTest is our candidate there. In the open-source world, NUnit is the incumbent candidate.

MSTest’s greatest strength is in who created it. Microsoft’s offering of a complete end-to-end solution for product development, testing, deployment, and source control is a boon to developers. Writing applications in .Net means paying the Microsoft tax up-front, so why not keep it all integrated in the same product suite and offer developers a superior experience? Getting up and running in MSTest is as simple as Add -> New Test Project. No other solution provides that level of simplicity, and no other solution can guarantee that they can support future versions of the .Net runtime and Visual Studio.

I don’t feel that one killer feature, or one strength, should be enough to sway anyone on such an important choice. This is especially so when some would argue that other choices like NUnit are the defacto solution. So what are MSTest’s strengths? Why should I pick it over NUnit? Let’s jump in and find out!

Drew: MSTest properly instantiates a new instance of the test class for each test method being executed. This provides a number of advantages. First, it allows for easy state management in your tests, your setup and teardown code will be run each time a method is called and your instance variables are automatically reset. There’s no need to reset them manually as it is in NUnit. Indeed, many of MSTest’s other strengths rely on this very principle, as we shall see.

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