Visual Studio unit testing - how to access external files?

Question

I have data files used as input to my unit tests. These files are quite big and I don't want to copy them each time unit tests are executed. Tests are executed without deployment. So I can just put them into folder under my solution, and... how to obtain path to my solution (or test project source code) when unit test is executing?

Answer 1

Because you can run a test project in different ways (TD.NET, Visual Studio, R# etc.), the path used to reference the tests can change.

For this reason, I embed test needed files in my test assembly and draw them out from there.

Answer 2

You can use:

Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location

in your tests to get the path of the assembly containing the unit tests.

Answer 3

Simple, make the location of the files configurable (and testable).

Then either, set it in the unit testing code or set it thru some config file.