How do I do Unit Testing with System.Reflection.Assembly.GetEntryAssembly().Location

Question

0.00/5 (No votes)

See more:

VS2010

, +

I'm a bit new to unit testing, most of my tests are fairly easy to do and just works brilliantly. However I'm trying to test this simple function and it fails me with the following error:

XML

System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

What am I doing wrong? VS2010SP1
SOLUTION: Thanks to the solution below I realized my mistakes and changed one line to this and now all is bliss.

XML

var s = Path.GetDirectoryName(new Uri(System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location).LocalPath)

Static method in class FolderSettings

XML

public static String ProgramFolder
{
    get {
        var s = (Path.GetDirectoryName(System.Reflection.Assembly.GetEntryAssembly().Location));
        return s;
    }
}

TestMethod:

XML

/// <summary>
///A test for ProgramFolder
///</summary>
[TestMethod()]
public void ProgramFolderTest()
{
    string actual;
    actual = FolderSettings.ProgramFolder;
    Assert.Inconclusive("Verify the correctness of this test method.");
}

Posted 22-Feb-12 4:37am

Erik Rude

Updated 22-Feb-12 4:58am

v2

Add a Solution

1 solution

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

BobJanova · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-22T04:44:00

When you're running the unit tests, the entry assembly will be the test hosting shell. That could be something useless like the nunit.exe assembly, or if you're using a binary test harness (e.g. Visual Studio itself), it will be null. (See the documentation for GetEntryAssembly[^].)

You should either use GetExecutingAssembly, if that's what you actually want to know in the general case (i.e. if someone links to your assembly, do you want the location of your assembly still?), or accept that something like this which is making assumptions about environment (i.e. that a particular assembly will be the primary entry point) is intrinsically not unit testable and not worry about it.

Considering it's a one line call to an external dependency (the Framework) which you can assume is well tested, I don't think you need a (pseudo-)unit test for this property anyway.