How to run ALL tests in my solution using command line MSTest.exe?

Question

According to MSDN here and discussed here, we can use MSTest.exe to run tests from command line - which is sweet and faster than running within the IDE (especially slow if you are working on a big solution like me).

My question is how can I use MSTest.exe to run all tests in my solution? The command only have the /test option to filter the tests in one assembly specified in /container option. I only can think of calling this command N times given that I can have all the N test assembly in my solution (!?) Moreover, the results after run are per-assembly basics so that it's not easy to get what tests were failed/passed.

If you know a better way, please share! Thank you!

Answer 1

I accomplished this using the testmetadata argument and pointing it to my .vsmdi file.

As explained here.

E.g.:

mstest /testmetadata:mySolution.vsmdi 

However note that testmetadata can be more fragile (e.g. empty test lists combined with the Ignore attribute cause "Specified cast is not valid"). Creating a batch with all DLLs containing test classes could be more reliable alternative.

Answer 2

I needed the same thing, without wanting to install anything or generate vsmdi files, so I came up with this PowerShell script, below. It runs ALL tests in one command on a folder and it's subfolders (not solution, but fine for me).

Feel free to suggest how to make this script more elegant:

$x = ""; dir *\bin\*test*.dll -Recurse | foreach { $x += "/testcontainer:""$_"" " }; iex "mstest $x" 

Instructions:

• Add path to mstest.exe via Environment variables variable PATH, otherwise just replace mstest with its full path in the PowerShell script above.

  

• Open PowerShell, paste the command.
• Modify *\bin\*test*.dll to meet your needs. In current script it will get all DLLs in the bin folder recursively, containing substring "test" in the filename.
• Run the command!