Microsoft has open sourced its Visual Studio Test aka VS Test platform. The latest open source project by the software giant was originally used by its internal team to run tests in various languages.

Available as a part of the .Net Core Tools in Visual Studio, VS Test is popularly used for integrated testing with Visual Studio. The platform is capable of running tests across multiple cores. Further, developers can perform tests written in any language and testing frameworks.

“VS Test is a very extensible unit test execution framework. The base engine discovers tests and runs them. It can parallelise across cores, provides process isolation and can integrate with Visual Studio,” Microsoft writes in a blog.

VS Test supports xUnit, NUnit, Karma, Google Tests and Jasmine. Also, there is support provided for 25 adapters along with the provision to create more.

Microsoft has designed the VS Test model with four main components. It has a Test Runner to receive test container with the configuration of detailed tests and a Test Execution Host to load and execute test commands. Additionally, a Data Collector Host comes from the test execution framework along with data listeners and an IDE/Editor to provide an interface for developers to trigger test runs.

Yet to receive full open source treatment

Notably, Microsoft has currently open sourced only runner and execution host process. But the company does have some plans to release code for data collection infrastructure, protocols of communication with IDE, configuration with CLI integration and various testing hosts in the coming future. Likewise, a development to open sourcing MS Test V2 is also in the pipeline to ease test developments.