How to test a class member that is not public using Visual Studio 2010 ?

There are various ways to test a Class member which is not public

• By making the private members public of a class under test

• Breaks the encapsulation principle
• API is modified just for the sake of testing

By making the private members internal of a class under test and annotate the assembly with internalsVisibleTo attribute and you can read more about it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0tke9fxk.aspx

• Breaks the encapsulation principle
• API is modified just for the sake of testing

Make the private members reachable through a public member of a class under test and test these public members

• Breaks the encapsulation principle
• API is modified just for the sake of testing

Use reflection to invoke the non public members of a class under test

Using reflection is abstracted in Visual Studio so we can use

• PrivateObject to access non public Instance members of a class under test
• PrivateType to access static members of a class under test

These classes are inside Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting namespace. I have created code snippets in Visual Studio 2010.CodeProject

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