Advanced options

Additional options are available within the options section of Visual Studio. Navigate to menu "Tools" (or "Extras") / "Options" and then within the list on left side look for entry "TestExecWindow".

Remark:
If there are no entries visible on the right side, please close the option window again and reopen it. Now the entries should be visible. This seems to be a bug in Visual Studio and may depend on the version you have installed.

Option: Build solution before starting test
If this option is active, then each time when you push one of the "Run" buttons within TestExecWindow first the current solution is built. If build fails then the test will not be started. Only if build succeeds the selected test cases are executed.

This has the following advantages:

after code changes you cannot forget to build before starting a test
you have not to wait until build is completed before you can start your test manually. Simply edit and save your new code and then push "Run" within TestExecWindow.

You may have reasons for not activating this option:

you don't want a build of the whole solution before starting a test, because the test needs only a small part of the projects within the solution
even in case of no code changes Visual Studio may need a too long time span for checking build dependencies and finally deciding that no build action is needed.

In both cases you can think of using smaller test solutions where only such code is contained which is related to a specific topic or to a limited set of SW modules.

Option: Limit CPU for StdOut
If your test executable produces bursts of messages to stdout (which are directed to log pane of TestExecWindow) the Visual Studio GUI sometimes seem to hang. It is now possible to activate a yield for the thread receiving the output burst. A typical output burst may be caused by memory leak messages at program termination.

Option: Run until failure
Sometimes your test app may have sporadic failures. With activating this option your app will be executed repeatedly until a failure occurs (i.e. your test app returns an exit code different from 0). Now you have the chance to examine the test protocol and traces of a failed execution.

Option: Command line args
This option sets the default command line args which can also be set directly within options of tool window as described above.

Option: Show more options within tool window
This option controls the visibility of the options pane within tool window. The visibility can also be controlled by the buttons "..." and "Hide" within tool window as described above.

Read next chapter: Typical test activities
Read previous chapter: More settings - defaults args and configuration of layout