News

Visual Studio Test Platform Released To Open Source Community

Portions of the unit test execution infrastructure that's used in Visual Studio is now an open source project.

The Visual Studio team says it has released portions of its Visual Studio Test Platform to the open source community. It's available on Github here, with the docs here. It's currently available to look around and test out, but not for contributions and comments, which is planned for later.

Visual Studio Test Platform, or VSTest, is a unit test execution infrastructure that is extensible, in that it supports running tests using various test platforms. A good overview of VSTest is here and here. "If you use unit testing in VS, there's a good chance you use this infrastructure already," writes Microsoft's Brian Harry, in a blog post. "If you are using the unit testing capabilities that have been delivered in the .NET Core previews, you are also using it."

Harry notes that the open source portions currently are the cross-platform vstest.console.exe test runner and the execution hosts, testhost.exe (for .NET) and the cross-platform dotnet.exe testhost.dll.

Test frameworks, also called test adapters, are available in the VS Marketplace, and many of them are open source. Harry's team also has a home-grown adapter, MSTestV2, which he said the group is planning to release as an open source project some time in the future. "We did not open source that framework at this time but we plan to in the next few months -- it just wasn't ready at this time," he said.

About the Author

Michael Domingo is a long-time software publishing veteran, having started up and managed several developer publications for the Clipper compiler, Microsoft Access, and Visual Basic. He's also managed IT pubs for 1105 Media, including Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine and Virtualization Review before landing his current gig as Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief. Besides his publishing life, he's a professional photographer, whose work can be found by Googling domingophoto.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Compare New GitHub Copilot Free Plan for Visual Studio/VS Code to Paid Plans

    The free plan restricts the number of completions, chat requests and access to AI models, being suitable for occasional users and small projects.

  • Diving Deep into .NET MAUI

    Ever since someone figured out that fiddling bits results in source code, developers have sought one codebase for all types of apps on all platforms, with Microsoft's latest attempt to further that effort being .NET MAUI.

  • Copilot AI Boosts Abound in New VS Code v1.96

    Microsoft improved on its new "Copilot Edit" functionality in the latest release of Visual Studio Code, v1.96, its open-source based code editor that has become the most popular in the world according to many surveys.

  • AdaBoost Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the AdaBoost.R2 algorithm for regression problems (where the goal is to predict a single numeric value). The implementation follows the original source research paper closely, so you can use it as a guide for customization for specific scenarios.

  • Versioning and Documenting ASP.NET Core Services

    Building an API with ASP.NET Core is only half the job. If your API is going to live more than one release cycle, you're going to need to version it. If you have other people building clients for it, you're going to need to document it.

Subscribe on YouTube