Here's a little sidebar that I bet you didn't know. Actually, that was probably more accurate at my old site where my readership measured on a more, shall we say, intimate, scale.

Anyway, I recently converted a project from NUnit to MbUnit just because I felt like it. (Oh, I'm kidding. I have reasons. Boring but valid ones. So don't sic the alt.net police on me.) In the past, that has involved adding the assembly reference for MbUnit, then performing a global search and replace of the appropriate using statement. Perhaps cleaning up the different Assert syntax but in general, it's a pretty painless process.

This time, I got null reference errors in all tests in several class and to make a long story short (don't get used to it, I don't do it often), I traced it to the SetUp method:

    [ SetUp ]
    protected void SetUp( )
    {
        // Do stuff
    }

Notice that it is protected, which apparently makes it all but invisible to MbUnit. I switched it to public and my world is fully tested again.

Initially, I thought it might be worthy of a bug report. But here is kind of what I typed out:

Hey dudes! You got yerself a fine 'n dandy little product here. But I got meself some tests here someone was nice enough to write out for me in NUnit and when I converted them to MbUnit, they done gone failed on me 'cause the SetUp method is protected even though... the tests themselves are...ummm... y'know...public...

Here's where I started to feel a little silly and considered that maybe the MbUnit folks knew what they're doing when they wrote the product (although I wouldn't mind it handling nullable types a little differently).

So I guess I don't really make this long story all that shorter. The Hillbilly is nothing if not contradictory.

Kyle the Taciturn