MSTest Deployment without DeploymentItemAttribute

Question

Is there any way to deploy an item without using this attribute? I'm starting to get a stack of attributes over my test base and it's becoming hard to maintain. Most of my items are DLLs that need to be put into a folder below the deployment directory.

Answer 1

You can define them in the local test run configuration.

Test => Edit Test run configurations => choose one.

Go to the deployment section, add you deployment items.

The problem here is that you need to maintain the test run configurations, which is sometimes not better then maintaining the attributes. Even more, the tests are not self contained anymore, they depend on this configuration. And - the deployment items are deployed even if you only run a single test which wouldn't need it. But sometimes its easier here.

IMHO, MSTest is quite half-baked. Deployment items are a nightmare.