Rolling Back After Database Tests - TransactionScope
For a while now I've been using Roy Osherove's data rollback attribute to ensure that integration tests against the database clear up after themselves.
Unfortunately I ended up having to give up on it because in the move to using .NET 2 and NHibernate I introduced a base class that all our persistence test classes should inherit from. It had the majority of the code needed to do persist/update/concurrency unit tests and was a big time saver. Unfortunately the class used generics, since generics and ContextBoundObjects are a big no-no (see this article) and since the data roll back attribute relied on you (indirectly) deriving from ContextBoundObject I needed to look elsewhere.
In the end I chose to use a TransactionScope, I create it in the test initialize and Dispose of it in the test cleanup method. It seems to work OK though I've occassionally had odd DTC related errors which is a slightly worrying!
Equally annoying is that my test base class idea falls down slightly as VSTS doesn't allow you to put tests in a base class (as described in this feedback item). This means that although I can put the majority of the test code in the base class I need to actually define the tests in the derived class, the tests then call back to the base class which will then call to abstract methods implemented in the derived class (normal template method pattern). What a mess :)
