We are building .NET Framework 4.8 in C# with MsTest v2 using OnPrem Azure DevOps Pipelines (with TFVC). When the build completes, we have a quality gate step that validates that coverage has increased.

The thing is, sometimes, for instance, we get a decrease in coverage even though no change was done to testable code. We would like to be able to easily compare the coverage report (.coverage files) from run #1 to the one from run #2 to see where we lost ground.

As of now, I start 2 instances of Visual Studio, load one coverage file in each and manually look at every line until I find the difference but, due to the size of the solution, this is extremely time consuming.

Is there any way of automating this? I tried looking at the file but it seems to be some binary format I wouldn’t know how to exploit.