How do I get rid of the UTA002/UTA005/UTA006 warnings for my generic base test class?

Question

I have a few test classes that do similar things, need similar initialization and cleanup and similar instance variables. Thus, I created a base class and defined the TestInitialize and TestCleanup attributes on them:

Public Class ImportTestBase(Of T As {ImportBase, New})
    ' ...Some instance variables and protected properties...

    <TestInitialize()>
    Public Sub Init()
        ' Connect to Test-DB, start a transaction, instantiate the import class T
    End Sub

    <TestCleanup()>
    Public Sub Cleanup()
        ' Rollback the transaction, do other cleanup stuff
    End Sub
End Class

This reduces boilerplate code in my actual test classes:

<TestClass()>
Public Class AddressImportTests
    Inherits ImportTestBase(Of MyAddresImportClass)

    <TestMethod()>
    Public Sub SomeTest()
        ' Test something here
    End Sub

    ' No boilerplate Init and Cleanup here. Yippie!
End Class

This works great! Unfortunately, the Visual Studio (2015) test runner outputs some ugly warnings:

UTA005: Illegal use of attributes on MyNamespace.ImportTestBase`1.Init.The TestInitializeAttribute can be defined only inside a class marked with the TestClass attribute.
UTA006: Illegal use of attributes on MyNamespace.ImportTestBase`1.Cleanup. The TestCleanupAttribute can be defined only inside a class marked with the TestClass attribute.

This bothers me, because I don't like to ignore warnings. Adding TestClass to the test base class does not help; on the contrary:

UTA002: TestClass attribute  cannot be defined on generic class MyNamespace.ImportTestBase`1.
UTA005: Illegal use of attributes on MyNamespace.ImportTestBase`1.Init.The TestInitializeAttribute can be defined only inside a class marked with the TestClass attribute.
UTA006: Illegal use of attributes on MyNamespace.ImportTestBase`1.Cleanup. The TestCleanupAttribute can be defined only inside a class marked with the TestClass attribute.

Any idea on how to get rid of them?

Answer 1

Make your base class abstract (C#) or MustInherit (VB).