Running MSTest without Visual Studio – Gallio to the rescue
In some cases it can be useful to quickly run your Microsoft unit tests on a machine where Visual Studio is not installed. For example on an end-user machine and/or during acceptance testing. Microsoft unit tests have a great integration with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server, but unfortunately the unit tests cannot be run as a standalone application.
I saw there was an open-source adapter for NUnit, called Microsoft Team System NUnit Adapter from Exact Magic Software that can run Microsoft unit tests inside NAnt. For my unit tests I had some problems with the ExpectedException attribute. Then I noticed there is a project called Gallio and it worked like a charm and it can do a lot more! I noticed that today a new version has been released, namely Gallio v3.0.4.
Gallio is a extensible , open and neutral test automation platform. It provides tools and services needed to run and manipulate tests written using a wide range of other frameworks. Gallio can run tests from
and it can integrate with the following tools
- CCNet
- MSBuild
- NAnt
- NCover
- Pex
- Powershell
- Resharper
- TestDriven.NET
- TypeMock
- Visual Studio Team System
To run the the tests there is a command-line runner, called ‘Echo’ and a graphical user-interface, called ‘Icarus’.
