Bill’s Dev Blog

In case anyone else is having this problem and cannot find a solution:

I just created a new unit testing project with Visual Studio, using C#. The skeleton program it creates looks simple enough. The skeleton code that was generated for me has these 4 namespace includes:
using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;


Without changing anything in the code or project, I attempted to build it, I got these errors:
error CS0234: The type or namespace name 'VisualStudio' does not exist in the namespace 'Microsoft' (are you missing an assembly reference?)
error CS0246: The type or namespace name 'TestMethod' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)
error CS0246: The type or namespace name 'TestClass' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

This is weird since a skeleton project should just build. I searched online for these errors and found NO ONE posting the same problem. Hoping to just simply be able to add a reference to the project, I looked for any DLL files on my system named “Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.dll” or similar and found nothing. I looked in the built-in list of .Net namespaces and could not find it either.

Solution:
Searching for less similar named references, I happened to stumble upon the correct reference. It is a built-in .Net namespace reference, just not named “Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting”, but rather: “Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework”. To add this to your unit test project, go to “Add Reference” and it should be listed under the .Net tab in the mix of other namespaces. When I added this to the references, the code compiled just fine, without modifying the namespace includes or anything.

As far as I know, unit testing is only available in Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite edition, but I have read it is also in Visual Studio 2005 for Team Testers edition.

Filed under:
Unit/Load Testing by admin