A while back I posted about the algorithm used for creating a test ID within VSTS Test Lists. I also made mention that I was writing a utility that allowed for basic test list management and unfortunately more time has passed between that post and me actually putting something out there for the community. In all honesty, this tool is very basic and I haven't had much time to work on it, but I hope it is feature complete enough to at least be usable by people wanting to create test lists for their build process.

When using this tool, the vsmdi file created must be at the solution root for the project (which is where VSTS puts it when they create it - this tool won't default to that location, but that is where it needs to be put). To create a test file, go to File->New and create the test list file (name it with a .vsmdi extension). When the file gets created, there are three nodes in the tree view (Lists of Tests, Tests Not in a List, All Loaded Tests). To add test lists to the file, right click on the Lists of Tests node and select "New Test List...". Within the new window, type the name of the test list and click OK. Test lists can be nested and you can create as many test lists as you like, but they must only be created under the "Lists of Tests" node. To load up tests, select File->Open and select .dll for the file filter. Navigate down to the location of your test assembly (test assemblies must be somewhere within the same directory tree as the vsmdi file) and load the dll into the application. Select the All Loaded Tests node to view all the tests within the test assembly. Expand the Lists of Tests node and drag tests from the grid to the correct test list (the Test List field in the grid will get populated with the fully qualified location of the test). Select File->Save to save off the vsmdi file and now this file should be usable by Team Build for your unit test execution during a build.

Here is the source for the management tool, hope you find it useful. If there are missing references, the location for the 2 files is C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies and you will need Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.Common.dll and Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.Tips.UnitTest.ObjectModel.dll.

Please let me know your experience with this utility (good, bad, or otherwise).

After playing with Visual Studio Team System for a while, the biggest draw back I have seen so far in the Developer SKU is that I can't get my unit tests to run with a build. A team build requires a test list and the only way to create a test list is through Test Manager and that is only available in the Tester SKU. Fortunately, I have Team Suite so I was able to create a test list, but the downside is that where I work, I am one of the only people with Team Suite, so every time a developer creates a new unit test, I am the lucky one who gets to add it to the list. After doing this a couple of times, I found it got old very fast, so I started to look at the vsmdi file that contains the test information and found it was a pretty simple xml file. The simplicity ended very quickly, though, when I found the Guid created for each test in the list is not just generated with Guid.NewGuid(). I did some hunting on the web to figure out how this Guid is created, but came up empty, so I decided it was time to bring out my old friend ILDasm and see what happens under the covers. For anyone interested (and I can't guarantee it will stay like this since the code was not in a publicly exposed API), the below method will generate the correct Guid for a test (where FullName is the fully qualified name of the method <Namespace>.<Class>.<Method> - since test methods never take parameters, method overloading is not an issue).

private Guid GuidFromString()
{
   SHA1CryptoServiceProvider provider = new SHA1CryptoServiceProvider();
   byte[] buffer1 = provider.ComputeHash(Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(FullName));
   byte[] buffer2 = new byte[0x10];
   Array.Copy(buffer1, buffer2, 0x10);

   return new Guid(buffer2);
}

I am still in the process of creating an application that will create test lists like what is created with the Tester SKU, but I wanted to post this in case other people are struggling to find the same algorithm for their needs.

Recently I switched roles where I work and we have started to use BizTalk quite extensively for our current project. We have also made the move to Team Foundation Server and VSTS and I got the great responsibility of getting our build system up and running. Now out of the box, Team Foundation Server has a great build story, but we had the requirement of being able to deploy our BizTalk application to a remote server and start the application as well. BTSTask.exe took care of 80% of that functionality by being able to add and remove an application and the resources for the application, as well as import bindings that exist within an XML file, but one thing I couldn't seem to find was how to start and stop a BizTalk application from the command line. Luckily BTSTask itself was a .NET application and since I am not afraid of ILDASM, I decided to take a look and see how BTSTask worked under the covers. One thing to warn you about is that all the documentation for the classes that are used within BTSTask (and also in the source code below) have the claim at the top stating the classes should not be used externally and are purely for internal BizTalk use. Overall, the program was pretty simple. I know there is not really any error handling or anything like that and the command line parsing probably isn't the most robust, but the command line syntax is very similar to what already exists for BTSTask and since the code is pasted below, you are more than welcome to modify it any way you would like.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM;

namespace BizTalkApplicationManagement
{
   class Program
   {
      private static string DatabaseName = "BizTalkMgmtDb";
      private static string DatabaseServer = ".";
      private static string ApplicationName;
      private static bool Start = false;

      static void Main(string[] args)
      {
         ParseCommandLine(args);

         if (ApplicationName == null)
         {
            throw new ApplicationException("ApplicationName must be passed in");
         }

         Microsoft.BizTalk.ApplicationDeployment.Group myGroup = new Microsoft.BizTalk.ApplicationDeployment.Group();
         Application application;

         myGroup.DBName = DatabaseName;
         myGroup.DBServer = DatabaseServer;
         BtsCatalogExplorer explorer = (BtsCatalogExplorer)myGroup.CreateInstance(typeof(BtsCatalogExplorer));
         ApplicationCollection applications = explorer.Applications;
         application = applications[ApplicationName];
         if (application != null)
         {
            if (Start)
            {
               application.Start(ApplicationStartOption.StartAll);
            }
            else
            {
               application.Stop(Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM.ApplicationStopOption.StopAll);
            }
            explorer.SaveChanges();
            explorer.Refresh();
         }
         else
         {
            Console.WriteLine("{0} does not exist in database [{1}] on server [{2}]", ApplicationName, DatabaseName, DatabaseServer);
         }
      }

      static void ParseCommandLine(string[] args)
      {
         foreach (string currentParam in args)
         {
            if (currentParam.ToLower() == "start")
            {
               Start = true;
            }
            else if (currentParam.ToLower() == "stop")
            {
               Start = false;
            }
            else if (currentParam.ToLower().Contains("applicationname"))
            {
               ApplicationName = currentParam.Split(':')[1];
            }
            else if (currentParam.ToLower().Contains("server"))
            {
               DatabaseServer = currentParam.Split(':')[1];
            }
            else if (currentParam.ToLower().Contains("database"))
            {
               DatabaseName = currentParam.Split(':')[1];
            }
         }
      }
   }
}

You will need to add references to Microsoft.BizTalk.Admin.dll, Microsoft.BizTalk.ApplicationDeployment.Engine.dll, Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM.dll, and Microsoft.EnterpriseServices.dll.

From the command line, you would then start an application like so:
BizTalkApplicationManagement Start -ApplicationName:<NameOfBizTalkApplication> -Server:<Server> -Database:<BizTalkMgmtDb>