How to make Assert.AreEqual pass on POCOs

Assert开发者_如何学C.AreEqual is failing on POCOs. It, however, is not failing on individual items in POCOs. How to make it work on full POCOs in VS 2010

Do your POCOs override Equals in an appropriate way? If not, that's the problem. Override Equals and GetHashCode and you should be fine.

That's assuming there's only one notion of equality which you need to cover. An alternative is to implement IEqualityComparer<T> in another class, and use that. (I don't know offhand whether Assert.AreEqual takes an optional IEqualityComparer<T> parameter, but you could always call it explicitly.)

you could look into the expected objects library. its very neat and handles all of your comparison logic for you behind the scenes, making your code significantly easier and slimmer. you can even tell it to ignore types, so if you want to just check a couple properties of an object, you can compare it with an object, or anything for that matter.

The tests are failing because your objects are not equal. They may have the same values in their fields, but this does not make them equal. By default objects are equal if they have the same address and so they are the same object.

To get the behaviour that you want (which is that you want objects which have properties with the same values to be equal) you need to override Equals and define what it is that makes your objects equal. If this is all properties then check all properties here. If it is just some then only check those. Do whatever needs to be done to determine equality in your context.

If you are overriding Equals you should also override GetHashCode and ensure that when Equals is true for two objects GetHashCode return the same value for both.