During the course of the WPF project we are working on at work, we decided to go down the Agile/XP/TDD/Mocks/Continuous Integration route, which means Unit tests, lots of them.
We are using NUnit, which I really like, but we are also using WPF, we are obviously using the latest/greatest patterns AKA MVVM, but from time to time, it is nice to be able to test certain things on WPF controls/windows, etc.
So I set out to create a small NUnit test like the following:
![37323/diag11.jpg](/KB/WPF/37323/diag11.jpg)
Now to me this looked fine, but when I ran this code, I got the following horror show.
![37323/stathread-thumb.jpg](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==)
Where NUnit moaned about “The calling thread must be STA”. Oh, that’s to bad. So I had a small think, and then came up with this small idea, just pass the original code to a helper class and have it run that in a Thread using STA threading apartment state. Sounds cool, but did it work. Well yes actually it did, and here is the small helper class.
![37323/diag2.jpg](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==)
And here is how to use this from a NUnit test.
![37323/diag3.jpg](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==)
And just to prove it works, here is a screen shot of the actual test running successfully.
![37323/stathreadok-thumb.jpg](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==)
Here is a link to a small test project that you can see this working with in case you want to use this in your own projects.
Enjoy!
I currently hold the following qualifications (amongst others, I also studied Music Technology and Electronics, for my sins)
- MSc (Passed with distinctions), in Information Technology for E-Commerce
- BSc Hons (1st class) in Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence
Both of these at Sussex University UK.
Award(s)
I am lucky enough to have won a few awards for Zany Crazy code articles over the years
- Microsoft C# MVP 2016
- Codeproject MVP 2016
- Microsoft C# MVP 2015
- Codeproject MVP 2015
- Microsoft C# MVP 2014
- Codeproject MVP 2014
- Microsoft C# MVP 2013
- Codeproject MVP 2013
- Microsoft C# MVP 2012
- Codeproject MVP 2012
- Microsoft C# MVP 2011
- Codeproject MVP 2011
- Microsoft C# MVP 2010
- Codeproject MVP 2010
- Microsoft C# MVP 2009
- Codeproject MVP 2009
- Microsoft C# MVP 2008
- Codeproject MVP 2008
- And numerous codeproject awards which you can see over at my blog