Remote unit testin of a WebService in Visual Studio 2010

Question

I need to change my unit test from local to remote tests and so far I thought that all I had to do is change UrlToTest to point to another server... But VS keeps on insisting to create a Development Web Server instead of using the one that is already running.

So after reading some docs my question actually is do I have install Test Controller and Test Agent on both remote and local computer or what? What if the WebService is on Linux...

Note that I don't want to debug the application that I'm testing. I simply want tests to be executed for a WebService that is already running, that is deployed.

I probably should mention that all my tests consists of WebService calls and some checks like this:

    [TestMethod()]
    [HostType("ASP.NET")]
    [AspNetDevelopmentServerHost("MainProjectName", "/")]
    [UrlToTest("http://servername:port/websitename/TestingOnlyWebForm.aspx")]
    public void LoginEmptyDataTest()
    {
        IUserService userService = CreateIUserService();
        string email = "";
        string password = "";
        ReturnMessage<User> actual;
        actual = userService.Login(email, password);
        Assert.AreNotEqual(true, actual.Status);
        Assert.AreNotEqual("db_error", actual.Info);
    }

But I have also more complicated tests in which I change some data and send it to another WebService and so on.

Note that UrlToTest previously was pointing to localhost at which point it works but starts a developer server which is not what I want.

Answer 1

What you are trying to is not possible. All that generated unit test is trying to do is to run the test locally on the machine either using the development server by specifying AspNetDevelopmentServerHost or by using local IIS, when AspNetDevelopmentServerHost is not present.

If you want to test remote services right click your unit test project and add a service reference. Point to your service give it a namespace, say Services, and generate the proxies. Once you have the proxies generated just instantiate them and call the methods. Also remove all the unneeded attributes from your test. Your test should roughly look like this:

     [TestMethod]
        public void LoginEmptyDataTest()
        {
            using (var userServiceClient = new Services.UserServiceClient(
                                        "BasicHttpBinding_IUserService", 
                                        "http://someremotehost/userservice.svc"))
            {
                var result = userServiceClient.Login("user", "password");

                // asserts go here
            }
        }

This may solve your immediate problem however you should re-think what you are doing as @eglasius said. what happens if the code you call changes state internally? Next test might fail because of that so you need clean-up strategies otherwise your tests will be very brittle and you'll end up ignoring them.

Update: passing an address at run-time. Change the first parameter to whatever enpoint configuration name you have in your config file.