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.

Many of o

Answer 1

Was searching a solution as well, maybe the following will be easier to maintain.

Add a new build configuration e.g. "Unit testing Debug" to the DLL project and change the Configuration Type to be "Static Library .lib" ("General"->"Configuration Type").

Then just add a dependency of your unit tests on this project, now everything should link together when you use new build configuration "Unit testing Debug". If you are using release builds for unit tests then you need to add another configuration with release optimizations.

So the benefits of this solution are:

• low maintanability cost
• single DLL/Static library project
• don't have to manually link to .obj files

Drawbacks:

• Extra configuration profile(s) will require some changes in your build environment (CI)
• Greater compilation times

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Update: We actually ended up using a different approach.

We added new "Test debug"/"Test release' configurations for every existing project that we have.

For .exe/.dll projects we disable the original main.cpp from compiling and replaced it with the one that instantiates the test framework (e.g. gtest) and runs all the tests, the tests are in separate .cpp files which are also excluded from compilation in regular configurations (Release/Debug) and enabled only in Test configurations.

For .lib projects we also have new "Test debug"/"Test release" configurations and there we convert the static library to be an .exe file and provide a main.cpp which instantiates the testing framework and runs the tests and tests themselves. Test related files are excluded from compilation on Release/Debug configurations.