Migrating Your Test Project Between VS/Standalone

Lately some of Test Studio's users have been trying to use both the Visual Studio plugin and the Standalone edition in unison. To put it a different way - some of our users want to be able to migrate their test project from VS to Standalone and vice versa freely. This is completely doable but our users need to be aware of some limitations. Here's some more info:

Limitations on migration between Express and Standalone

A Test Project in Visual Studio has a specific format that is native to Visual Studio. It can hold a Test Studio test (tstest extension) but at the same time it can hold a lot of other stuff (unit tests, class files etc). It also contains Assembly references, a Solution that holds it and a lot of other stuff.

In a VS project you can have a test reference a different class file.

A Test Project in Standalone is not the same thing. A Test Studio project holds Test Studio tests (tstests extension) and very few other things. It can hold class files but only in the form of a code behind file. When you create a TS test and add a coded step to it – a class file is generated with the same name. That’s a code behind file and this is the only type of class file that your Standalone project will hold.

The rest of the stuff that makes up your VS project – independent class files, assembly references, unit tests – they cannot be carried over into a Standalone test in a meaningful way. The only thing that can be carried over is the actual tstest files along with their corresponding code-behind file and resources file as seen here.

So it’s not a simple matter of just getting a VS project and opening it in Standalone. You can just carry over the tstests but not much else. It gets trickier if the tests inside of the VS project depend on other stuff that’s inside of the VS project. 

So if you have “independent” Test Studio tests that don’t reference outside stuff (other than each other ) you can easily create a Standalone project  and import them in there. If your tests have assembly references you can manually recreate them in a Standalone project like this.

This should give you a basic idea of the challenges involved. The good news is that the process of migrating a Standalone test into VS is simple.