Runtime Edition - minimum Visual Studio edition required

[Shashi]

Hello,

Could you let me know which edition of Visual Studio (Test Professional, Professional, Premium or Ultimate) is *minimally* required on servers that will only build and/or run tests (no test development) in a Microsoft Test Manager/TFS/Test Studio Runtime Edition test environment? 

1) We are currently using Test Studio 2012.2.1420.0 - however, we are investigating an upgrade to 2014.1.* or 2013.*  (so if there are any differences in the information between these releases, please let us know the info for both). 
2) We are using Visual Studio 2010 on our servers (since we are working with TFS 2010) but can install Visual Studio 2012 if needed. 
3) We need to be able to run tests both from Test Manager UI (from the same or a different computer) or using tcm.exe (command line equivalent of MTM).

I have been trying to set up a server (win Server 2008 R2 Standard and Test Studio Runtime Edition 2012.2.1420.0) with Test Professional 2010 only and a combination of Test Professional 2010 and Test Professional 2012 (because latter comes with tcm.exe - while the former doesn't).  But I have been running into a series of issues which seem to be related to missing Microsoft DLLs. I have resolved some of them - but keep running into more.  Details can be provided if required.

We do currently have functioning test server environments with Visual Studio Ultimate - these have been working without issues for 2-3 years now. The above stems from an effort to try and downgrade Visual Studio on these servers for cost reasons.

Any help would be much appreciated.  Please let us know if you have questions.

Thanks,
Shashi 

[Ivaylo]

Hеllo Shashi,

The following Visual Studio editions are compatible:

• Ultimate, Premium, and Professional editions allow extensions/plugins

Please also note that you should be running Visual Studio as administrator. More about the system requirements you can see in this article.

Please note that we are not responsible for missing Microsoft DLLs. Using the exception you are getting you can look over the Internet on how to solve the problems you are experiencing.

Thank you for your understanding.

Regards,
Ivaylo
Telerik

 

[Shashi]

Hello Ivaylo,

Thanks for your response - sorry for the delay in responding. 

Just in case you missed it (which would be my bad - I should have highlighted it), we are trying to set up build and/or test servers only.  This means that we do not plan on opening Visual Studio (the dev environment) and editing/running tests from it.  The servers will only be used for 
a) Running tests launched from MS Test Manager (the UI) or its command-line version - tcm.exe. 
b) Building the tests via TFS (only one server will have this role).
NOTE:  This is why we are installing the Test Studio Runtime Edition - and not the full version on these machines.

Given the above, is it not sufficient to use VS Test Professional on these machines?  If not, could you let me know what is the *minimum* level of Visual Studio that is needed? 

Regarding the System Requirements that you pointed me to, I already looked at that - it seemed to be written for a full development environment - rather than an environment as I have described above.  There is mention of the Runtime Edition - but it is not clear how much of the other requirements is applicable to it (again, on an environment that will not be a dev environment).  If I am correct, it might be worthwhile to create a separate page for such environments - or at least have them in a separate section.

Regarding the Microsoft DLLs, I wasn't blaming you for the missing MS DLLs - I only mentioned it to describe issues I was encountering while trying to set up pure Test Professional environments.  However, I would expect the Runtime installer to install the DLLs that it depends on - or at least inform the user if it does not find them (or the minimum version of Visual Studio on the machine).  Neither of these happened in my case - the Runtime Edition installed without any issues.

Thanks,
Shashi


 

[Ivaylo]

Hello Shashi,

Thank you for your clarification.

In this case you need to configure only a build server and you don't need Visual Studio installed at all.
Please follow this article in order to proceed.

Regards,
Ivaylo
Telerik