Is Visual Studio Required to run Coded UI tests on a build server?

Question

I have references to

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UITest.Extension;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UITesting;

But I'm building on a server without Visual Studio installed.

My builds are failing because these dlls can't be found (their path is in the VS install directory on my local machine)

Does this mean VS is required to run these on the build server? Or can I just copy the dlls into some project folder and add them as references?

Answer 1

The recommended approach is to install VS on the build server and the licensing is such that you are able to do that. The team know that this is not an ideal solution but it's the only one we have today. Note that the build server images provided by Microsoft in the hosted environment ( tfs.visualstudio.com ) have VS2012 and VS2010 installed into them for exactly this type of reason.