Ignoring accessibility levels

Question

Hey, currently I'm writing unit tests for a large project, and a problem has occured.  I need to test private, protected and internal classes in the project assembly, but I need to do it from a seperate assembly.

The reasoning for this is, I don't want the project assembly to contain unit tests, as it will be being released to end users, but more importantly I don't want them there as  they will effectivly double the size of each project, making loading and linking times considerable longer.

is there a way that I can get my test assembly to ignore the accessibility level system in the project assembly, without changing code in the project assembly?  If not, is there another way around this problem?

Thanks fo any help,
Andy

Answer 1

Check out partial classes http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wa80x488(VS.80).aspx if they meet your requirement

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Answer 2

Partial classes weren't really the answer, as it would still add additional testing methods to each class.

I did however solve it using reflection.

Thanks for your help ^_^

Answer 3

If you use MSTest it has a feature called "Accessor".

Basically if you have a class Calculator you can right click on the cliass and select Create Accessor.

It will then create Calculator_Accessor in your test project that will give you strongly typed access to your private methods.

Otherwise you can add an attribute to Assembly.cs:

[assembly:InternalsVisibleTo("MyProjectTests")]