I have the Enterprise edition of Visual Studio, but not everyone does.
How can I share the TRX so that other people can see the results? I've seen that there are several Trx to HTML convertors but they're all quite old and either don't work any more or don't show the details of the test.
Most of the results of a load test are stored in a database. The TRX file has only a very small portion of the results - you can easily see what it actually contains by opening the file in Notepad, it is just XML.
Visual Studio trial versions have some support for load tests. (They only support a small number of virtual users and do not support plugins.) They might allow viewing and analysis of the results of runs done on other computers. This limited support of load tests might also be available on licenced Non-Enterprise versions.
The results of individual load test runs, or groups of runs, can be copioed from one computer to another by using the Export and Import commands in the "Open and manage load test results" window. These create and read LTRAR files. See here for more details.
The TRX file contains a connection string to the SQL database and so the file cannot normally be copied and then work properly on another computer. The encoded connection string is located within the resultsRepositoryConnectString=... attribute within the TRX file. Changing the value in a copied file to a value found in a working TRX file on the destination computer allows the copied file to work. See here for more details.
The only other options for viewing results on other computers would be by exporting the results in Excel by using the "Create Excel Report" command. (Access it via the icons on the "Summary - Graphs - Tables - Details - ..." line in the load test results viewer.)
For unit tests, but not load tests, I routinely export trx files from my unit tests, because they ARE shareable, can be placed as attachments into our launch control systems, and DO contain all of the data necessary for the downstream teams to verify the results, including test console output. I do this with a custom task added to the project that runs the vstest.console.exe, with the /logger:trx;logfilename="blah" command line switch. The full task line is:
<Exec Command=""$(DevEnvDir)commonExtensions\Microsoft\TestWindow\vsTest.console.exe" "$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\$(OutputPath)$(AssemblyName).dll" /logger:trx;LogFileName="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\testResults.trx"" />
You can also add ContinueOnError="true" if you don't want a test failure to stop the build.
MSTest still seems to ship with visual studio, supposedly does support load tests, and historically has exported TRX files, but I haven't tried it. Running pre-2019 unit test projects, that still have tasks pointed to mstest, in vs2019 tend to fail with assembly version errors, so I don't know if it even still works at all.
How can i configure TFS (maybe there is a setting or extension) to show diff between office openxml files (like .xlsx or docx). Now the TFS (online) just shows yellow banner like one below. I want to have side-by-side diff.
If such an extension exists, you will find it on the VSTS Marketplace, but unfortunately none produced a smart binary file differ like WinMerge or Beyond Compare.
The OpenXML format is a Zip containing many XML files, a text compare is useless. Your options are:
download the two versions and use Office (yes it has built-in diff for docs) or a tool like Beyond Compare (it may requires some plugin)
move to text based formats like CSV or Markdown
In our project solution we done the changes in 5 files (only content change) and the change set number is NNNNN, we want to download those 5 files only. We can get entire solution files upto this change set. Due to content change we want those files only instead of getting all other files like dll or *.CS files.
In other source control the view history displays the affected files, there is a provision to export those files into folder rather than entire solution.
You could write a little PowerShell/.Net code to do this or you can use the TFS Power Tools. There is a command line tfpt.exe and you can use the getcs flag
tfpt getcs /changeset:12
There is a decent write up of the process here
In case the question wasn't clear. I have 3 MVC projects in one Solution. Every time I create a new project it adds the "Scripts" folder with all the .js files I'll ever need. I don't want to have this created every time for every application. Is there a way to reference scripts from a central folder in the solution so all applications/projects can share one common script folder with all the scripts common among them?
Edit:
Please explain the pros and cons of doing this if there are any...now I'm curious.
Here is what I would recommend:
Right click the solution and create a New Solution Folder called Common Javascript Files (or whatever you feel like calling it.
Right click on the Solution, click Open Folder in Windows Explorer,
or navigate there manually for other versions of Visual Studio :(
In the solution directory, create a directory with the same name as the solution folder (solution folders do not normally match directories at the source code level but this will for sanity sake).
In this new directory, add files that need to be shared between solutions.
In Visual Studio, click the solution folder and select Add - Existing Item.
In the file selection dialog, navigate to the directory previous created, select the file(s) added to the directory and click Add.
In each Project that needs a shared file, right click on the project (or directory within the project) and click Add - Existing Item.
Navigate to the shared Directory, Select the files and click the drop down arrow then click Add As Link.
Now the files in the projects are essentially short cuts to the files in the Solution Folder. But they are treated as actual files in the project (this includes .CS or Visual Basic files, they will be compiled as files that actually exist in the project).
PROS
Files are truly shared across projects at Design time
Only the files needed for each project can be added, it's not all or nothing
Does not require any configuration in IIS (virtual directory etc)
If the solution is in TFS Source control, you can add the Directory to the TFS Source and the shared files will be source controlled.
Editing a file by selecting it in the Project, will edit the actual file.
Deleting a Linked file does not delete the file.
This is not limited to JS files, linked files can be ANY file you might need (Images, Css, Xml, CS, CSHTML, etc)
CONS
Each deployment gets it's own file.
There is a small learning curve when understanding that Solution Folders are not Directories that exist in a Solution Directory.
The best thing to do, imo, is to roll your own CDN... Basically just create another site in IIS and give it it's own binding, e.g. "http://cdn.somedomain.com"
Then store all of your css/js/fonts/shared images etc on the CDN site and link to them from your other sites.
Doing so solves 2 problems,
All of your stuff is shared when it needs to be and you only have to manage 1 revision per file.
Your users browsers can cache them in 1 single location instead of downloading copies of your stuff for every site that uses them..
I added this answer because I see a lot of people referrencing creating virtual directories. While that does indeed share the files, it creates multiple download paths for them which is an extreme waste of bandwidth. Why make your users download jquery.js (1 * number of sites) when you can allow them to download it once on (cdn.somedomain.com).
Also when I say waste of bandwidth, I'm not just talking about server bandwidth, I'm talking about mobile users on data plans... As an example, I hit our companies HR site (insuance etc) on my phone the other day and it consumed 25mb right out the gate, downloaded jquery and a bunch of stuff 5 times each... On a 2gb a month data plan, websites that do that really annoy me.
Here it goes, IMO the best and easiest solution, I spent a week trying to find best and easiest way which always had more cons than pros:
Resources(DLL)
Shared
images
image.png
css
shared.css
scripts
jquery.js
MvcApp1
Images
Content
Shared <- We want to get files from above dll here
...
MvcApp2
Images
Content
Shared <- We want to get files from above dll here
...
Add following to MvcApp1 -> Project -> MvcApp1 Properties -> Build events -> post build event:
start xcopy "$(SolutionDir)Resources\Shared\*" "$(SolutionDir)MvcApp1\Shared" /r /s /i /y
Here is explanation on what it does: Including Build action content files directory from referenced assembly at same level as bin directory
Do the same for MvcApp2. Now after every build fresh static files will be copied to your app and you can access files like "~/Shared/css/site.css"
If you want you can adjust the above command to copy scripts from .dll to scripts folder of every app, that way you could move some scripts to .dll without having to change any paths,here is example:
If you want to copy only scripts from Resources/Shared/scripts into MvcApp1/scripts after each build:
start xcopy "$(SolutionDir)Resources\Shared\Scripts\*" "$(SolutionDir)MvcApp1\Scripts" /r /s /i /y
This is a late answer but Microsoft has added a project type called Shared Project starting Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 that can do exactly what you wan't without having to link files.
The shared project reference shows up under the References node in the
Solution Explorer, but the code and assets in the shared project are
treated as if they were files linked into the main project.
"In previous versions of Visual Studio, you could share source code between projects by Add -> Existing Item and then choosing to Link. But this was kind of clunky and each separate source file had to be selected individually. With the move to supporting multiple disparate platforms (iOS, Android, etc), they decided to make it easier to share source between projects by adding the concept of Shared Projects."
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/somasegar/2014/04/02/visual-studio-2013-update-2-rc-windows-phone-8-1-tools-shared-projects-and-universal-windows-apps/
Info from this thread:
What is the difference between a Shared Project and a Class Library in Visual Studio 2015?
https://stackoverflow.com/a/30638495/3850405
A suggestion that will allow you to debug your scripts without re-compiling the project:
Pick one "master" project (which you will use for debugging) and add the physical files to it
Use "Add As Link" feature as described in Eric's answer to add the script files to the other projects in solution
Use CopyLinkedContentFiles task on Build, as suggested in Mac's comment to copy the files over to the second over to your additional projects
This way you can modify the scripts in the "master" project without restarting the debugger, which to me makes the world of difference.
In IIS create a virtual folder pointing to the same scripts folder for each of the 3 applications. Then you'll only need to keep them in a single application. There are other alternatives, but it really depends on how your applications are structured.
Edit
A scarier idea is to use Areas. In a common area have a scripts directory with the scripts set to be compiled. Then serve them up yourself by getting them out of the dll. This might be a good idea if you foresee the common Area having more functionality later.
Most of the files that are included by default are also available via various CDN's.
If you're not adding your own custom scripts, you may not even need a scripts directory.
Microsoft's CDN for scripts: http://www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary/cdn.ashx
Is there any tool exist that transfroms trx file into Excel format?
I am looking for something that will automate unit test result publishing at the time of test suite execution (without requiring microsoft team server)
You can use http://trx2html.codeplex.com/ which provides an easy way to convert an rtx file into an html document.
If you just need the information about the test name and whether passed or failed, you could copy the columns from Test Results UI (in Visual Studio) and paste on excel.
I created a tool for this propose, the trx file will be converted to Excel 2010 format with useful information.
Pls try: https://youtu.be/G7VASkhim7I
Instructions
Download the Trx2Excel application from here and run the application.
Select the option: Get data from one file or from a folder.
Select the result file (for single file option) or result folder (for multiple files option).
Select the location and the saved file (the output file).
Click the Convert button.