Preface

Starting with Visual Studio 2012, private accessors cannot be created any more by the IDE. The post Home-made Private Accessor for Visual Studio 2012+ presents an approach on how to create private accessors using the class Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.PrivateObject.

Axel Mayer noted in the MSDN forums post How to create private accessors in VS 2012 that one can use the command line tool publicize.exe to create private accessors too.

Usage Of Publicize.exe

The usage of publicize.exe is quite simple. Open a command prompt, or a “VS2013 x86 Native Tools Command Prompt” to have the search path already set up, and run publicize.

In case you do not have the path set up correctly, the tool can be found at %Program Files (x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE for Visual Studio 2012 or %Program Files (x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE for VS 2013. At least, the tool is located there for the Ultimate edition of Visual Studio. I can’t tell which other editions contain it. Just have a look.

For a complete reference please refer to Using Publicize to Create a Private Accessor.

The usage in short: publicize.exe [options] input-assembly

The created assembly needs to be referenced by the test project. Of course, the source assembly – the assembly containing the classes to be tested – has to be referenced by the test project too.

publicize.exe creates classes named NameOfTheSourceClass_Accessor. In case the class to be tested is called MyClass, the accessor is named MyClass_Accessor.

publicize did work well for .NET 4.0 and .NET 4.5 assemblies in my tests. It also covered async and static methods.

Limitations

The docs mention that publicize does not support delegates or events.

From my tests I can add another limitation: publicize does not support Windows Store app assemblies (or I was not able to use it correctly). Running it against such an assembly I received these error messages (and a few more of the same type):

“Cannot resolve dependency to Windows Runtime type ‘Windows.UI.Xaml.Application’. When using the ReflectionOnly APIs, dependent Windows Runtime assemblies must be resolved on demand through the ReflectionOnlyNamespaceResolve event.”

“Cannot resolve dependency to assembly ‘System.Runtime, Version=4.0.10.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a’ because it has not been preloaded. When using the ReflectionOnly APIs, dependent assemblies must be pre-loaded or loaded on demand through the ReflectionOnlyAssemblyResolve event.”

Maybe you can give a hint on how this can be resolved. If so, please add a comment below. Thanks!

Resumé

As long as I don’t need accessors for Windows Store app assemblies, the usage of publicize.exe is my preferred way to generate private accessors.

In case publicize.exe does not support the source assembly type, I will created the private accessor myself as described by Home-made Private Accessor for Visual Studio 2012+.

Links

Home-made Private Accessor for Visual Studio 2012+

How to create private accessors in VS 2012

publicize.exe documentation