Unit Testing WCF Service is launching

Question

I'm new to WCF. I've created a basic service and engineer tested it with the debugger and WCFTestClient. I've never written my own WCF client. Now I need to build unit tests for the service.

My classes:

IXService
CXService
CServiceLauncher

(Yes, I know the C prefix does not meet current standards, but it is required by my client's standards.)

My service functionality can be tested directly against XService , but I need to test CServiceLauncher as well. All I want to do is connect to a URI and discover if there is a service running there and what methods it offers.

Other questions I read:

• AddressAccessDeniedException "Your process does not have access rights to this namespace" when Unit testing WCF service - starts service host in unit test
• WCF Unit Test - recommends hosting the service in unit test, makes a vague reference to connecting to service via HTTP
• WCF MSMQ Unit testing - references MSMQ, which is more detailed than I need
• Unit test WCF method - I never knew I could auto generate tests, but the system isn't smart enough to know what to assert.

Test outline:

    public void StartUiTest()
    {
        Uri baseAddress = new Uri("http://localhost:8080/MyService");
        string soapAddress = "soap";
        IUserInterface target = new CServiceLauncher(baseAddress, soapAddress);
        try
        {
            Assert.AreEqual(true, target.StartUi());
            /// @todo Assert.IsTrue(serviceIsRunning);
            /// @todo Assert.IsTrue(service.ExposedMethods.Count() > 4);
            Assert.Inconclusive("This tells us nothing about the service");
        }
        finally
        {
            target.StopUi();
        }
    }

Answer 1

I just needed to build a simple client.

Reference: http://webbeyond.blogspot.com/2012/11/wcf-simple-wcf-client-example.html

1. Add Service Reference to test project

2. Add to test file:

   using System.ServiceModel;

   using MyTests.ServiceReferenceNamespace;

Code inside try is now:

            Assert.AreEqual(true, target.StartUi());
            XServiceClient client = new XServiceClient();
            client.GetSessionID();
            Assert.AreEqual(CommunicationState.Opened, client.State, "Wrong communication state after first call");

Answer 2

It's not a real answer so please take it easy.

I have been trying to do similar things and what I have learnt that integration testing is difficult. It is difficult because there are many hidden tasks that you need to do, such as:

• Make sure you can run the tests regularly
• Make sure integration tests can run on the test environment
• Maintain different config files, as your environment will be different from the test one
• Configure the thing that would automate running of integration tests (CI)
• Pray there will be no changes to the paths, test environment, config, hosting platforms etc
• Fight security permissions, as usually test thing is not able to host WCF services without admin permissions
• Maintain your test harness

To me, this was huge headache and little gain. Don't get me wrong, integration testing is a positive thing, it just requires a lot of time to develop and support.

What have I learnt? Is that do not bother with integration testing of WCF services. Instead I write a lot of unit-tests, to test the contract, state and behaviour. By covering those, I can become sure in a quality of software. And I fight integration of WCF during deployment. This is usually a single battle to configure environment or VM and then next time, deployment goes nice and smooth in an (semi-)automated manner.

Most people would also automate deployment with Chef and alike, those tools can fully configure environment and deploy WCF service.