As those who are doing unit testing in Visual Studio Team System will know, it is not always the easiest thing to access the Test Run results after a build. You have to expand the Result Details panel, click on the test results file and select a location on your local machine to download the results to before they can be opened in Visual Studio again. For some people this is a good enough reason to use CruiseControl.NET.
To provide a workaround to those who wish to stay purely in the Visual Studio environment, I have written (well glued, technically) a simple solution in the form of a custom task for Team Build that displays any failing tests directly in the "Build steps" panel. I cannot take the credit for the bulk of the code that inserts the messages into the panel which is a modified version of the example on Aaron Hallberg's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/aaronhallberg/archive/2006/08/29/adding-buildsteps-to-team-build-through-a-custom-task.aspx. The rest of the code simply spins through the Test Results folder (as available in each Team Build by the $(TestResultsRoot) variable) and then grabs the UnitTestResult messages and stack trace from each .trx (Test Result file) that it finds, writing each line to its own build step.
This means we can now get output such as the below, indicating the cause of a failure immediately:
Deployment of the custom task is a fairly simple process. If you want to make the change globally to a Team Build server, simply drop the attached assembly into “%ProgramFiles%\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v8.0\TeamBuild” and customise the Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets file in the same folder to include the following:
At the top with all the other "UsingTask" elements:
<UsingTask TaskName="UnitTestFailureParser" AssemblyFile="Conchango.TeamBuild.Tasks.UnitTestFailureParser.dll" />
Then replace the "AfterTest" target with:
<Target Name="AfterTest">
<UnitTestFailureParser
TeamFoundationServerUrl="$(TeamFoundationServerUrl)"
BuildUri="$(BuildUri)"
TestResultsRoot="$(TestResultsRoot)" />
</Target>