Unit Testing Using the Command Line

This is another in my series of blog posts on unit testing. If you are not
familiar with unit testing, go back and read these posts.
• Introduction to Unit Testing in Visual Studio
• Avoid Hard-Coding in Unit Tests
• Unit Test Initialization and Cleanup
• Add Attributes to Unit Tests
• Using Assert Classes and Methods in Unit Tests
In this post, you are going to learn to run unit tests from the command line.
This allows you to schedule tests using task manager or any other automated
scheduling tool. The [Link] is the tool you use as a .NET
developer to run your unit tests in your .NET test dll.

Simple [Link] Run

The [Link] is typically installed into the following path:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio
14.0\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TestWindow. When you
run this tool, you need to prefix this path to the .exe, or add this path to the
PATH environment variable. If you open a Developer Command Prompt for
VS2015 (Figure 1) this path will already be included.

Figure 1: Use the Developer Command Prompt

Unit Testing Using the Command Line

If you have been creating the project as you have been following along with
this series of blog posts, you have a DLL named [Link] located in
the \bin\Debug folder of where your project is located on your disk. Open a
Developer Command Prompt and navigate to that folder. Type in the following
in your command window.

[Link] [Link]

Press the Enter key and you should see something that looks like Figure 2.
You may or may not have the warnings depending on if you added the
DeploymentItem attributes.

Figure 2: A simple run of the [Link]

View Installed Loggers

Now that you know how to run your unit tests from the command line, you
now need to learn to log the results to a file that you can look at later. If you
are going to be running your unit tests overnight, you want to come back in
the morning to see the results. If they are just sitting in a command window,
you could accidentally close that window and you would lose the results.

2 Unit Testing Using the Command Line

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 Using Logger

Instead, the [Link] utility has a set of loggers that you can use.
Type in the following in the command window.

[Link] /ListLoggers

Press the Enter key to see a screen that looks like Figure 3.

Figure 3: View the log options you can use with [Link]

The ConsoleLogger is the one you are currently looking at in your command
window. The TfsLogger is useful if you are using Team Foundation Server as
it allows you to send the results to TFS so you can assign work items based
on any failed unit tests. The last one is the one that will be useful if you do not
have TFS. The TrxLogger creates a .trx file which you can load into Visual
Studio and see a list of all of your unit tests. You can then click on each test
and see the results, and the outputs for that test.

Using Logger
Let’s take a look at using the TrxLogger option when using the
[Link] utility. Type in the following into the command window.

Unit Testing Using the Command Line 3

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Unit Testing Using the Command Line

[Link] [Link] /Logger:trx

Press the Enter key and the unit testing will run. The results are now stored in
a .trx file located in the TestResults folder under your \bin\Debug folder. Each
time you run a new .trx file is added with a later date and time add to the file
name.
Double click on any of the *.trx files and it will load the results into a Test
Results window in Visual Studio as shown in Figure 4. You can double-click
on any of the tests to see the output from that test.

Figure 4: Visual Studio can display all results from a .trx file

Run Specific Test(s)

The [Link] utility allows you to specify single or multiple test
method names to run. If you are just testing one or two items, there is no
reason to run all the tests in your DLL. Add the /Tests parameter on the
command line followed by a comma-delimited list of method names you wish
to execute. Type the following into your command window.

[Link] [Link] /Tests:FileNameDoesExist

Press the Enter key and you should see a result that looks like Figure 5.

4 Unit Testing Using the Command Line

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 Run Specific Test(s)

Figure 5: The /Tests parameter does pattern matching on your method names

Notice that multiple tests where run even though you only specified a single
name. This is because the /Tests parameter uses pattern matching on your
method names. It will find any method that starts with the name you pass in
and run those methods.
You can use a comma-delimited list to specify different sets of methods to
run. Type the following into your command window.

[Link] [Link]
/Tests:FileNameDoesExist,
FileNameNullOrEmpty_ThrowsArgumentNullException

Press the Enter key and you should see results that look similar to Figure 6.

Figure 6: You may use a comma-delimited list after the /Tests parameter

Unit Testing Using the Command Line 5

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Unit Testing Using the Command Line

Filter Tests to Run based on Attributes

As mentioned in the blog post on attributes, the Priority attribute is not used
by the unit test framework. However, when you use the [Link]
utility, you are allowed to filter based on the Priority attribute. Type in the
following to the command window and you can run just those methods that
have the Priority(1) attribute.

[Link] [Link]
/TestCaseFilter:"Priority=1"

The /TestCaseFilter lets you specify attributes and specific names of methods
to run. For example, if you want to just run one test with the name of
FileNameDoesExist, you type in the following into the command window to
run that one test.

[Link] [Link]
/Name:"FileNameDoesExist"

Another attribute you can specify to run is TestCategory. Run the following in
the command window to just run those tests marked with
[TestCategory(“NoException”)].

[Link] [Link]
/TestCaseFilter:"TestCategory=NoException"

You are not allowed to use both the /TestCaseFilter parameter and the /Tests
parameter together. You must just run one or the other.

Summary
Running unit tests in a batch is made easy with the [Link]
utility. This utility allows you to log the output to a file for later review. You can
also log to TFS to help you assign work items to unit tests that fail. The
[Link] utility also lets you filter the tests to run using either a /Tests
parameter, or a /TestCaseFilter parameter.

6 Unit Testing Using the Command Line

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 Sample Code

Sample Code
You can download the code for this sample at [Link]/downloads.
Choose the category “PDSA Blogs”, then locate the sample Unit Testing
Using the Command Line.

Unit Testing Using the Command Line 7

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All rights reserved. Reproduction is strictly prohibited.