Having a large lab management setup can be quiet cumbersome to maintain in terms of managing lab workflow definitions in Visual Studio. Often, you would like to test your software in multiple languages and on multiple operating systems. The combination can easily lead to 25 different build workflows, each testing the same software with the same tests just in different configurations. Its quiet obvious that tooling can support you with those kind of management tasks.
This is the reason why I created a small tool to do so. The Lab Workflow Manager let’s you create multiple workflow definitions based on one configuration.
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As you can see in the above screenshot, the tool covers all the settings you can configure an the lab workflow wizard in visual studio. The multiplication of the generated workflow definitions happens based on the settings chosen in the Environment section. Here you can choose multiple environments. It is also possible to choose multiple configurations for one test environment, but this only makes sense if the tests are run differently (additional extensions needed). The combination of chosen environments and chosen configurations will result in the number of generated lab workflow build definitions.
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The generated build definitions contain a generated id in the description and can therefore be recognized by the tooling. The generated workflow definitions should be be changed manually in Visual Studio, since the will be overwritten be the Lab Workflow Manager if the Generate button is pressed again.
The settings you setup in the tooling are stored in a configuration file (*.lwfdef) on your file system. Multiple lab workflow definitions can be managed in a configuration file. It is planned to support to store these settings as a TFS work item in the future.
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You can get the tool for free here. Please note: This tool is currently still in beta state. Any liability resulting for the user or a third party from using the software, its data files and damage resulting from this, consequential damage, lost profit, failure in operation, loss of information or any other property loss is excluded.