How can you use “external” configuration files (i.e. with configSource) with an MSTest unit test project?

Question

For simplicity, I generally split a lot of my configuration (i.e. the contents of app.config and web.config) out into separate .config files, and then reference them from the ma

Answer 1

Test run configurations are a bit awkward when trying to run tests outside of Visual Studio.

For command line execution using MSTest they become quite cumbersome to keep "clean". They are also "global" to the solution so external files will be copied for every test project.

I much prefer the DeploymentItem attribute.

[TestMethod]
[DeploymentItem(@"test_data.file")]
public void FooTest()
{...}

Makes the tests independent of the .testrunconfig files.