Running Coded UI tests from Visual Studio Shell

Question

I have a suite of Coded UI tests that I would like to hand off to someone else in my organization to execute. Our environment is not setup for executing tests from MTM, and the users who are responsible for executing the tests only have access to "Visual Studio 2010 Shell."

Is there a way for them to execute the tests that I've created? As far as I can tell, the "Shell" edition of Visual Studio does not contain mstest.exe. Additionally, when they attempt to open the solution files they receive an error stating the following:

 

<path to project file> cannot be opened because its project type (.csproj) is not supported by this version of the application. 

To open it, please use a version that supports this type of project.

Does anyone know of a way to resolve this issue?

 

Thanks.

Answer 1

Frank Rose,

Visual Studio Shell does not support execution of Coded UI Tests.  As of current, only Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Premium support execution of Coded UI tests. 

See:

Supported Configurations and Platforms for Coded UI Tests and Action Recordings

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd380742.aspx

 

Cheers,

Paul

Answer 2

Is there any way to execute the tests without Visual Studio? I'm guessing there's not, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

Answer 3

Frank Rose,

Note: This solution is not officially supported and may violate your license agreement with Microsoft.

That said, you can copy the necessary dll's required to execute the MStest.exe command line test runner.  You would need to copy the following files from a machine with Visual studio installed: