Dennis Stone's Blog

I thought I’d make a brief post giving an overview of what automated testing looks like in our 2010 release.  While it’s true that in this release we focused primarily on nailing the experience for the manual tester there is quite a bit of carryover...

Overview: This post will go over some simple but effective ways to setup common initialization and cleanup for Unit Tests on a larger scale than [ClassInitialize] and [TestInitialize] methods can provide for. First, to establish a common starting point...

One of the key areas of focus for Visual Studio Team System 2010 is to enhance the experience for testers. There’s already lots of overview information on many of the new features out there so I’m going to dive right in to one of my favorite new features...

In the previous Getting Started post for this series I covered the basics of creating a connection to the server and getting an instance of ITestManagementTeamProject which is at the core of just about everything you may want to do with the Test Management...

Overview This post kicks off a series that will explore the Test Management API’s.   Using these API’s you can accomplish many tasks that may not be possible via the UI, Microsoft Test Manager (MTM).   Perhaps you have test assets in another...

Along with the new tools we’ve added in VSTS 2010 for testers comes the TCM.exe command-line application.  This command-line isn’t intended to be an alternative for everything you can do in Microsoft Test Manager (MTM) but rather to fill some gaps...

In my last post I gave an overview of what automated testing looks like in VS / TFS 2010 with the new testing features.  In 2010 we’ve added Test Plans which contain Test Suites which you can think of as a folder hierarchy to separate and organize...

Overview This post kicks off a series that will explore the Test Management API’s. Using these API’s you can accomplish many tasks that may not be possible via the UI (Microsoft Test and Lab Manager (MTLM) code named Camano). Perhaps you have test...

Most of the time when you want to bind a web test, request, validation rule, or extraction rule property to a datasource you just click on the value in the properties grid and there is a dropdown that provides UI for selecting the datasource to bind to...

Sometimes it can be useful to create “fake” builds in Team Foundation Server in order to successfully use other ALM features in the product.  If you aren’t using Team Build to generate the build drops for your application but you’d like to have a...

Here is an article with some custom rules and plug-ins that you can use to apply dynamic querystring correlation to your web tests. These can be useful if you are testing a site that uses querystring parameters to track dynamic values (such as session...

Several new API Enhancements have been made for WebTest's in the Orcas release of Visual Studio Team System. Here are some links to examples: DeclarativeWebTest & DeclarativeWebTestSerializer: http://blogs.msdn.com/densto/pages/declarativewebtest...

There’s a good post over at http://blog.nfocus.co.uk/2010/07/oi-what-happened-to-my-test-results.html by Danny Crone that goes over a scenario where a Retention Policy was specified on a Build Definition and testers were unpleasantly surprised to find...

I was just getting started on what I intended to be my next post on this blog when I realized that the topic in that post would be much easier to discuss and understand if I first wrote about Test Points.  A Test Point is an object in our TCM Object...

There’s a nice video demo featuring Test Impact you may find interesting here: http://blog.nfocus.co.uk/2010/03/vs2010-test-impact-one-giant-leap-for.html The demo is a little under 20 minutes and actually touches on quite a few of the integration features...

Duat Le, a Developer on our team, has put up a very nice post that goes over how to query Test Objects using WIQL (Work Item Query Language).  This information will be very useful if you ever need to use our query syntax in any code you write against...

There’s a nice post on Test Impact from within Visual Studio (geared towards Developers rather than testers) here . Check it out if you’re interested in learning about a different side of Test Impact!