title: Code Coverage Reporting with Visual Studio 2013 Professional for native C++
body: <p>Using the C++ unit testing framework with Visual Studio 2013 Professional, one can write unit tests and run them from within the IDE, but in order to generate any coverage reports, apparently, one needs to have the Premium or Ultimate edition of Visual Studio.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Is it possible to get code coverage reports with the Professional edition, preferably without installing any third party tools?</strong> If not, what alternate options exist for people who are not using the more expensive editions of the IDE?</p>
  
  <p>Please note that it's possible to generate the coverage data by using command line tools, but I am unable to find a way to look at the results. For the sake of reference, here are the steps for command line generation of the coverage statistics:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Build the code to test with with <code>/PROFILE</code> linker switch </li>
  <li>Run <code>vsinstr /coverage &lt;binaryName&gt;</code> to instrument the code; make sure that you are inside VS 2013 command prompt </li>
  <li>Run <code>start vsperfmon -coverage -output:results</code> to run the profiler </li>
  <li>Run your unit tests </li>
  <li>Stop the profiler by running <code>vsperfcmd -shutdown</code></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>The above will give you a results.coverage file, with no way to view it without the Premium or Ultimate editions as far as I know.</p>