coverlet VS coverlet

Code coverage tools are a great way to improve the code quality, but there are a lot of tools that require a paid license to use it like dotCover, the Enterprise version of Visual Studio or Visual Studio extensions. After some research, I found out that two free tools combined can generate code coverage reports. The first tool is called Coverlet which generates the code coverage as I wanted and it's also working with .NET Framework. Essentially is creating an XML report file that covers the lines, branches, and methods. And the second tool is ReportGenerator which is used for parsing the generated XML and expose the data in a friendly format.

You might have noticed when you were looking in NuGet, there was a package called coverlet installed into the project:

There are a lot libraries to collect code coverage, one of this one is Coverlet: https://github.com/coverlet-coverage/coverlet

We use Coverlet. You have to do some work to get it working with your tests but I have no complaints. I don't know for sure if it works with VS Community, but since it plugs into MSBuild I'm not sure how it could be gated to that.

And I would like to build a total test coverage for the solution. So, I added coverlet.msbuild to the dependencies and executed the next command from the examples of coverlet

CoverletOutputFormat: The format of the report that coverlet will generate (opencover, cobertura, json). More here;

Utilize Coverletand Report Generator utilities – however, this is where its funny, because these are .NET CLI tools that need the .NET 6 SDK installed.

Coverlet works really well.

However, I am hesitant to do so. Whenever it seems I have to fight the tools that are provided for me this is a likely sign that I’m Doing Things Wrong because of some fundamental misunderstandings and misassumptions on my part. I did some digging and found that VSTest by design forces the placement of data collectors’ output into GUIDed subdirectories, see Coverlet documentation, Coverlet issue #500 and VSTest issue #2378. That this is forced by design reinforces my worries that I’m doing something counterproductive.

Coverlet