Running webtests without Microsoft Visual Studio Testing edition/Team Suite

Question

Is there any way I can run Microsoft webtest not having Microsoft Visual Studio Testing edition/Team Suite? Any third-party tool or a way to run it through command line? I have MS VS Professional Edition 2008 installed. Thanks!

Answer 1

If you're referring to testing your web application via it's user interface (i.e. automating the clicking of buttons and entering text etc.) rather than unit testing of code-behind classes etc. then I think your best bet is to use either:

WatiN (probably the most popular 3rd-party tool for this)
or Selenium.

Both are open source and freely available, and both include the ability to run tests from a command line thus enabling integration into your test harness and continuous integration cycle.

EDIT:

In response to Michael's comment on this answer:

No, as far as I know, neither WatiN nor Selenium will run your previously created MS WebTest web tests.

Also, I did some further research and discovered that you also cannot run those MS WebTest web tests without having Visual Studio Team System/Testing Edition installed.

Your Visual Studio 2008 Professional has unit testing built-in, and this can be automated at the command line using the MSTEST.EXE command-line tool.

Incidentally, this exact same tool is also used to automate the running of web tests from the command line in Visual Studio Team System, as detailed here.

Unfortunately, the MSTEST.EXE tool is only 18kb in size, and relies upon loading numerous external assemblies in order to delegate the actual testing functionality to the relevant type of test. In the case of web tests, your Professional edition of Visual Studio will not have those assemblies installed, and attempting to run a web test will result in the following error message:

File extension specified '.webtest' is not a valid test extension.

There is another StackOverflow question regarding this same problem (it's based on VS 2005, although the same applies to 2008).

It seems that MSTEST.EXE, despite being a command line tool, is fairly tightly "coupled" with a Visual Studio installation, and is difficult to separate, for example when users wish to deploy the MSTEST functionality to a build server for continuous integration without having a "full" installation of Visual Studio on the same machine. It seems this is very difficult to actually achieve, although a few people have posted blog entries and articles regarding attempts (albeit somewhat "hacky") to achieve this.

That said, however, it's still not possible to run MS WebTest web tests without Visual Studio Team System/Testing Edition.