What is Microsoft.NET.Test.Sdk and when should we use it in a test project?

👋 This is a general question for the VSTest team.

• What is the Microsoft.NET.Test.Sdk nuget package / library?
• When should we install this into a project and use it?

Currently, I have a simple test project and just updated this package to version 16.2.0. Everything is working fine. I then commented it out, full clean and rebuild and ran all the tests … which … worked?

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">

  <PropertyGroup>
    <TargetFramework>netcoreapp2.2</TargetFramework>

    <IsPackable>false</IsPackable>
  </PropertyGroup>

  <ItemGroup>
    <!--<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.NET.Test.Sdk" Version="16.2.0" />-->
  ... cut ....

I’m using Visual Studio 16.1.6 and the project leverages xUnit as the test framework.

I also tried looking through the docs in this repo but couldn’t find anything. The docs were pretty low level / technical … so I might have skipped over something in an attempt to find some info.

Thanks in advance for any help! 🎉

[karanjitsingh]

@PureKrome, building the project without the reference should work, but running tests will not work. Interestingly, you said running tests also worked? Try running tests both via VS and via the command dotnet test.

This reference is required for projects targeting dotnet core, it basically carries the test platform reference along with it.

[mfogliatto]

Sorry I didn’t see this earlier. We use the MSTest test adapter. I understand that Microsoft.NET.Test.Sdk is required, though test discovery doesn’t seem to work if that one is a dependency of a dependency.

The dependency chain looks like follows (all are PackageReferences):

MyTestProject -> TestDependency -> Microsoft.NET.Test.Sdk