How do you unit test private methods?

Question

I\'m building a class library that will have some public & private methods. I want to be able to unit test the private methods (mostly while developing, but also it coul

Answer 1

For anyone who wants to run private methods without all the fess and mess. This works with any unit testing framework using nothing but good old Reflection.

public class ReflectionTools
{
    // If the class is non-static
    public static Object InvokePrivate(Object objectUnderTest, string method, params object[] args)
    {
        Type t = objectUnderTest.GetType();
        return t.InvokeMember(method,
            BindingFlags.InvokeMethod |
            BindingFlags.NonPublic |
            BindingFlags.Instance |
            BindingFlags.Static,
            null,
            objectUnderTest,
            args);
    }
    // if the class is static
    public static Object InvokePrivate(Type typeOfObjectUnderTest, string method, params object[] args)
    {
        MemberInfo[] members = typeOfObjectUnderTest.GetMembers(BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Static);
        foreach(var member in members)
        {
            if (member.Name == method)
            {
                return typeOfObjectUnderTest.InvokeMember(method, BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.InvokeMethod, null, typeOfObjectUnderTest, args);
            }
        }
        return null;
    }
}

Then in your actual tests, you can do something like this:

Assert.AreEqual( 
  ReflectionTools.InvokePrivate(
    typeof(StaticClassOfMethod), 
    "PrivateMethod"), 
  "Expected Result");

Assert.AreEqual( 
  ReflectionTools.InvokePrivate(
    new ClassOfMethod(), 
    "PrivateMethod"), 
  "Expected Result");