Today I stumbled again about this and feel (once more) a bit frustrated about the current version of MSTest. In theory Visual Studio VS2008 supports Test-Class-Inheritance. Once you actually start using it, you pretty fast encounter one big limitation:

The test base class must be in the same assembly as the derived test

Mh, is that such an uncommon scenario that it’s not supported? Personally I don’t think so. What about context specification extensions for MSTest? Do I need to have a Specification base class in each test assembly? Oh, c’mon ?!

Just when you think it can’t get worse, you realize that

Tests using Test-Class-Inheritance are NOT EXECUTED when running inside a VS TFS 2008 TeamBuild

Awesome :-( Besides that, we also still have the *.vsmdi-hell (Replace * with the name your Solution and a number between 1 and 100 …), but that a different story.

If it was my personal decision I would ditch MSTest right away. It’ll be interesting to see whether I’m able to convince our development leads to go down that road …