Unit testing non-exported classes in a DLL

Question

We develop a C++ application using Visual Studio 2008 and unit test using Boost.Test. At the moment, we have a separate solution which contains our unit tests.

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Answer 1

Expanding on Tom Quarendon's answer to this question, I have used a slight variant of Simon Steele's response:

• Create a test project (using whatever test framework you like, I use CppUnit).
• In your test_case.cpp, #include
  .
• In the test project properties:
  • In Linker->General, add the source project's $(IntDir) to the Additional Library Directories.
  • In Linker->Input, add the .obj files to the Additional Dependencies.
• Add the dependency from the test project to the source project in Project->Project Dependencies.

Again, the only maintenance overhead is the standard one for unit tests - to create the dependency on the unit(s) you want to test.