Running two Microsoft Test Manager’s Side By Side
When working with Microsoft Test Manager (MTM), you might want to run two at a time. We often want this internally so we can test MTM with MTM. However, when we created MTM, we didn’t want people to accidently open up multiple instances just because they lost MTM in the noise of all the windows they have open up on the machine. Additionally, if your opening MTM results from Visual Studio (as a developer), we want to use one instance of MTM. This means one MTM at a time.
However, it turns out there is a simple work around for this – run MTM as a different user. All versions of windows support this from Windows XP to Windows 7. Vista makes you work a little harder, pushing you to the command line.
Windows XP/2003:
a) Find the shortcut for MTM on the start menu
b) Right click
c) Select ‘run as different user’
Windows 7/2008 R2:
a) Find the short cut for MTM on the start menu, or the task bar
b) shift-right click (e.g. hold down the shift key, and right click), on the shortcut
c) Select ‘run as different user’
Windows Vista/2008:
a) run a command prompt
b) type “runas /u:<domain and user> <path to MTM.exe> (e.g. runas /u:woodgrove\otherUser “c:\program files\microsoft visual studio 10.0\common7\ide\mtm.exe), and hit enter
c) enter the password, and the application will start
You now have two independent versions of MTM, which can connect to different servers.
Note, if you try to do data collection, or record actions at the same time in both, you will hit issues such as incorrect data, and potentially crashes. I don’t recommend this.
IMPORTANT: This is NOT supported. Your mileage may vary.
Comments
Anonymous
February 26, 2010
ah! nice work around i will try it out... -RamAnonymous
September 28, 2010
Attempted the above workaround with a valid service account, but failing ... :-( need resolution