Are there "Dynamic Playlists" of unit tests in Visual Studio?

Question

When working with unit tests in Visual Studio, it's possible to compile playlists that group the tests. This is useful, for instance, when developing a new feature for which we want to run only the related tests and not all the existing ones.

However, it seems to me the playlists can only be maintained "manually", by explicitly adding/removing unit tests.

It's better than nothing, but it would be great if I could some how "tag" my unit tests depending on some criterion (e.g. feature, test duration, etc.) and generate the playlists dynamically.

Is there any way to do something similar in Visual Studio with the default testing framework?

Answer 1

You can run certain tests contextually in relation to the current cursor position by right clicking and then "Run Tests", or hitting CTRL+R then T.

• If the cursor is within the body of a test, only that test will be run.
• If the cursor is within the body of a test class, only the tests in that class will be run.
• If the cursor is within a namespace, all tests in that namespace will be run.

See MSDN documentation on the subject.

Alternatively you can filter the test explorer in various ways. I often use the Project flag to exclude certain projects for instance.