I need your help finding a .NET unit testing framework, which supports the dynamic generation of tests.
Background: We're building some smoke tests (in addition to our unit tests) to run with our nightly builds. Among other things, these tests will load reports from a database. Each report will be run and compared to set of known results. We expect to have hundreds of reports and that the tests will take over an hour to run. Anyone (developer, QA or tech support) will be able to extend the tests by adding reports to the database.
We will discover the list of reports from the database. From this list, we **need** to create one test case per report. This granularity is required to allow a developer to focus only on the failed report (and not wait a long time for other tests to load and run).
So far I've considered:
- NUnit - no built-in support for dynamic generation of tests. It looks like it would take a fair chunk of CodeDom work to generate the test cases on the fly and load them into NUnit.
- csUnit - as far as I can tell the same problems as NUnit.
- AUT - an interesting advance on NUnit - but dynamic generation of tests doesn't appear to be one of Marc Clifton's priorities (nor does it appear there is any development going at the moment).
- MbUnit - promises a "Generative Unit test framework", but currently only supports Data driven testing with data loaded from an XML file. With some work it might be possible to extend MbUnit.
Are there any test frameworks that support dynamic generation of tests? Are any extensions of these test frameworks that support dynamic generation? Has anyone else taken a crack at this problem?
Update: author of MbUnit came through, MbUnit already supports test suites: http://blog.dotnetwiki.org/archive/2004/07/19/625.aspx. We're going with MbUnit for our torture tests.