MSTest in Express editions of Visual Studio 2010

Question

I'm leaning toward using MSTest as unit testing framework for a new project but I'm concerned with cutting off developers (maybe even myself in the future and/or in some specific environment) using Express editions of Visual Studio.

I know MSTest wasn't available in VS2008 Express but with Microsoft pushing unit testing in recent years I guess they could've added it to VS2010 Express. However I couldn't find any info on this in the list of Express features and I don't want to download and install express just to verify this.

So, is MSTest supported in Visual Studio 2010 Express?

Answer 1

It does not appear in Microsoft's list of features of Visual Studio Express 2010, and it would appear (according to this blog post) that it is not supported. Since express editions do not allow add-ins, you cannot even use something like TestDriven.net to run tests from within Visual Studio Express editions.

If you were to use NUnit for testing, you may get more mileage. That blog post shows a way of running/debugging NUnit tests using a bootstrapper, but an easier way is to set NUnit as the start action (in Project Properties -> Start External Program), and then passing the name of your dll as an argument. This will start and run NUnit when you run/debug your project, allowing you launch your tests from within Visual Studio, and also debug them if needed.