How do you test a custom VSTS/TFS Check-In Policy in Visual Studio 2017?

Question

I am working on creating a customized VSTS/TFS Check-In Policy. I followed the guidance given from this answer on how to create the check-in policy. Basically, I downloaded the source code from Colin's ALM Policy and made a few modifications to see if I can get it to work.

When I build the installer (vsix) and install the extension, this works just fine (tested against VSTS). However, I want to be able to debug the policy so that I can make modifications and bug fixes more quickly.

The answers given to a similar question seem to work for Visual Studio 2015, however this does not work for Visual Studio 2017; if I set the debug start action to launch Visual Studio 2017 devenv.exe, the check-in policy does not show up. The same check-in policy shows up with Visual Studio 2015 though.

I'm looking for any guidance on how I can debug this check-in policy utilizing Visual Studio 2017.

Answer 1

There is test project (ColinsALMCheckinPolicies.UnitTests) that you can debug. So just need to add breakpoints to the source file, then debug the test method (right click a test method > Debug test)

Answer 2

I hate answering my own question, however I feel it is necessary since this answer helped me out; I found the answer from the MSDN documentation :The Experimental Instance.

Basically, under the VSIX Installer project properties, simply setup the Debug start action and command line arguments using the /rootsuffix Exp argument:

If you do this, it launches the Visual Studio Experimental Instance with the VSIX already installed, and it attaches the process to your development environment too, which allows you to debug your extension.

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Also, I agree with the other answer to this question, https://stackoverflow.com/a/43672469/347172, suggesting that a unit testing project will be highly beneficial. It definitely will help to ensure that your code is properly unit tested and working too.