Visual Studio 2022 - Remote Testing

Several months ago I wrote a blog post explaining how could we debug a unit test running in a Linux container using Visual Studio 2019. In that post I mentioned that the experience is far from being great in VS2019. It was possible, but it required some manual steps.

When we want to debug a unit test running in a Linux container, our expectation is to have the same experience as when debugging locally:

Go to Test Explorer
Right Click on the Test and select Debug
The debugger starts and stops in a breakpoint inside the test

That’s exactly what Visual Studio 2022 brought to us with Remote Testing. Let’s see how it works.

Create a xUnit test project.

Choose .NET 6.0

For demonstrating purposes, let’s create the same test used when demonstrating how to debug in Visual Studio 2019. This is a simple test that asserts that the test is running in a Linux container.

  [Fact]
  public void Test_is_running_in_linux_container() {

      Assert.True(RuntimeInformation.IsOSPlatform(OSPlatform.Linux));

  }

Now add a new file testEnvironments.json to the root of the solution

{
  "version": "1", // value must be 1
  "environments": [
    {
      "name": "WSL-Ubuntu",
      "type": "wsl",
      "wslDistribution": "Ubuntu-20.04"
    }
  ]
}

Basically I am adding a new test environment to run my tests in a WSL Ubuntu 20.04 distribution. To check the list of distributions you can run wsl --list in a command prompt. In Test Explorer you now have a dropdown with the list of test environments. Let’s select the test environment just added, WSL-Ubuntu.

Note: if you don’t see the new environment, then close Visual Studio and launch it again. This is an experimental feature and I have experienced some issues while playing with it. We could also add environments connected to docker containers running locally on Docker Desktop, or even remote environments connected by SSH.

Put a breakpoint in the test that you want to debug and select it in Test Explorer to start debugging it.