FAQ from Lab Management Event (Denver) on 8/9/2011

Thanks to everyone who attended today’s Denver event focusing on Lab Management in Visual Studio 2010 (and thanks also to Sirk for presenting)!

I’ve put some of the questions asked today below with their corresponding answers.  I hope you found the event worthwhile!

When I snapshot my virtual machine in Lab Management, can I also snapshot the database server as well?

When you snapshot in Lab Management, the entire environment (which is 1 or more virtual machines) is snapshot at the same time.  So if your database server is included in the Lab Management environment, it will also get snapshot.

Are there keyboard shortcuts for marking test steps as pass/fail in Test Runner?

Yes.  You can use Win+Ctrl+Q and Win+Ctrl+W respectively.  Check here for a full list of keyboard shortcuts in Test Manager.

How can I import test cases/steps from Excel into Test Manager?

Your best bet is the TCM Import tool on CodePlex, called “Test Case Migrator Plus”.

How does a Coded UI Test (or Action Recording) find controls?

Is uses MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility) to find controls in an application.  This means there is no screen-scraping or coordinate-mapping, which is a good thing.  Your tests will still work if you move a control on the screen.  If you rename a control, the DOM searching technology in the test framework will broaden its search to try and locate the control again.  Because of this, not EVERY single framework in the world is supported.  For a complete list of supported configurations, click here.

Why is IE9 not a browser type available when setting up a web performance or load test?

Probably because IE9 hadn’t been released when VS 2010 RTM’d.  For a full list of available browser types, click here.

Where are the load test results stored?

The results are stored in a SQL server database of your choosing.  You can store them in the same SQL Server as TFS, but it’s not recommended.