Friday, April 22, 2005

nunit.core.dll and GAC

I came across a useful tip on using NUnit in purely XCOPY fashion. NUnit download comes with an installer. During its installation, it sneakily would GAC the nunit.core.dll for you. This may or may not be causing you problem if your development source tree also contains your NUnit assemblies. By that I mean your build scripts might be structured in a way that it does not rely on each of the machine to have NUnit installed before building, but it uses its own source-controlled, XCOPY'ed NUnit exe and co.

If your machine does not have NUnit installed, but you get it through your source control system, when you run the test assemblies through the NUnit exe, you might get a nasty error (TDA: actual error message) from NUnit saying it cannot find nunit.core.dll or something.

One of the solution (that my colleague and NUnit contributor) Mike Two suggests is that in your projects where you would use nunit.framework.dll, to also add a reference to the nunit.core.dll of your source tree. This guarantees that NUnit would be able to find it and load it into its AppDomain. This way you will never need to install NUnit and rely of the assembly being GAC'ed.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I can't believe how much googling was required to find this answer! Thank you :)