https://partner.microsoft.com/en-AU/membership/msdn-subscrip...

The registration fee is something like $2K.

There are various competencies you need to demonstrate to become a partner, but there's enough diversity between them that most businesses with Microsoft tech somewhere in the stack could become a partner.

Test Professional is an interesting product, with recording manual tests, turning them into code, running them as a suite etc.

https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/test-professional/

Now, that said, such an approach would definitely not scale up to projects with huge amount of tests, or tests that take hours and hours to run. As such, LUT provides ways to create 'test sets'. i.e. sets of tests scoped down to just the work you're doing. The intent is to have flexible way to create these sets and the individual sets can be set up to run automatically or manually depending on your preference.

A nice things is that all of these test run outside of code VS. So the perf of the tests is far less impactful on VS than it would be otherwise. i.e. you don't have a single GC engine trying to manage all the memory for core VS as well as whatever garbage the tests are generating. With this, and with tests running at lower pri, your editing experience should not be impacted (and we take perf impact very seriously with this feature).

Cheers!