How do I access private members from a VB.NET test case?

Question

I'm using VS 2010 Professional built-in test cases. I've got a class that has a read-only property that looks something like this:

    Private _server As IServer = Nothing
    Public ReadOnly Property Server()
        Get
            If _server Is Nothing Then
                RemotingSetup.RegisterHttpBinaryChannel()
                _server = RemotingFactory.CreateProxy(Of IServer)(Options.DevLocal)
            End If

            Return _server
        End Get
    End Property

In my test cases I want to make a fake server implementation so I can test some of the class methods without actually hitting the server. I've looked around and have seen the InternalsVisibleTo attribute, but that seems to only allow access to Friend-level members.

Is there any simple way to get access to these members, aside from declaring them Public/Friend?

check this question : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/250692/how-do-you-unit-test-private-methods — Matthieu, Aug 01 '11 at 20:27

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 01 '11 at 20:18

Apart from using a mocking library that will mock private members (such as TypeMock, which is the only one I know of that does this), you are out of luck, at least when it comes to testing this particular class directly.

There are other possibilities - you can subclass from this class and only override this property. This will let you test all other functionality. Of course, this assumes that the class isn't sealed (NotInheritable).

How do I access private members from a VB.NET test case?

1 Answers1