Can I use mstest.exe without installing Visual Studio?

user_188233 0
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I want to use mstest.exe to run my unit test on build server, but I don't want to install Visual Studio on the build server. Can I just install MSTest without Visual Studio?

build-server mstest visual-studio
8 Answers

I just got this working on my servers without installing the Visual Studio 2017 IDE. My requirement was

  • Build projects
  • Build test projects
  • Run tests using VSTest (I believe it is a similar process for MSTest)

I had to do a combination of a few things stated in other answers and then also another one here.

VS2017:

  1. BuildTools - This can be found on the Microsoft downloads page, and then scroll down to "Tools for Visual Studio 2017" -> "Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017"
  2. TestAgent - This can be found on the Microsoft downloads page, and then scroll down to "Tools for Visual Studio 2017" -> "Agents for Visual Studio 2017"
  3. Nuget Package to include the visual studio unit testing dll - This can be found here

Step 3 was to fix the following issue:

"Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework""

Which then caused:

"error CS0234: The type or namespace name 'VisualStudio' does not exist in the namespace 'Microsoft' (are you missing an assembly reference?) "

I did not have to add any references to the project. However, the path to the vstest.console.exe is contained in the TestAgent folder (for me it was "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\TestAgent\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TestWindow")

user_55886090

If you need to run mstest.exe webtest tool then you can install Visual Studio Enterprise trial and make sure to run it at least once (just start it) under account under which test will be running with nothing additional needs to be done. So if your test run under System account then you need to use something like below

PS C:\agent> psexec -s cmd.exe
C:\Windows\system32>"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\Common7\IDE\mstest.exe"
Microsoft (R) Test Execution Command Line Tool Version 15.0.27520.0
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Please specify tests to run, or specify the /publish switch to publish results.
For switch syntax, type "MSTest /help"
user_18073740
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