Unit Testing SharePoint in a 64-bit Environment

I’ve recently upgraded all my development environments to pure 64-bit (except, of course, for Visual Studio, which continues to be a 32-bit laggard) to take advantage of the extra memory space available in x64. When working with really large lists and datasets, having less than 1GB for the w3wp process is self-defeating – it’s not uncommon to crash the worker process even with paged gridviews. Plus, the performance of SharePoint and SQL Server on 64-bit is head and shoulders above x86, making it easier to work with multiple VM’s at once.

That being said, I’ve been behind the curve in getting all the code in my core presentations converted over to a true MVP pattern with unit tests and the like, so I decided to take some time ahead of the Devlink conference later this month to refactor my high performance code samples. What should have been a relatively simple task soon turned into a man-against-machine bare-knuckles cage match. I really like the MSTest framework in Visual Studio, so I started rewriting all my old NUnit tests to take advantage of the nice IDE integration that Visual Studio Team Test 2008 offers. Within a few minutes I ran head first into an unmovable wall. No matter what I tried, as soon as I tried to run a test against any methods which referenced the SharePoint DLL’s I got a "System.IO.FileNotFoundException" error. No matter what I tried, VS simply would not run my tests.

After hours and hours of digging through Process Explorer, chasing down output in the debugger, and generally giving myself a splitting headache, I finally stumbled upon Lars Fastrup’s post on issues with vstesthost.exe in a 64-bit environment (Lars, I owe you a drink in November). Seems that the VS team never imagined we’d be running test cases against 64-bit DLL’s – here we are in 2009 and vstesthost.exe is still a 32-bit process. Great. So now what?

Well, it seems that there is no way to get VS 2008 to run tests in a 64-bit dev environment so I had to drop back to NUnit. Now, to be fair, NUnit and TestDriven.net are fine frameworks but they lack true IDE integration. I want a GUI inside of VS just like MSTest – I don’t want to launch a clunky WinForm app just to view the results of my tests. Plus, NUnit is just s-l-o-w compared to the Visual Studio test framework. Just what I needed – another slow add-in to put an anchor on my testing process.

So if you see me running NUnit for my test fixtures now you know why. We can only hope that the VS folks have seen the light and the VS2010 test framework will be native 64-bit. Anyone want to make a wager on the chances of that happening?