Why does visual studio 2012 not find my tests

Question

I have some tests that use the built in Microsoft VisualStudio TestTools UnitTesting  but can not get them to run   I am using visual studio 2012 ultimate   I have a solution of two projects  One has tests  using Microsoft VisualStudio TestTools UnitTesting   TestClass  before the class    TestMethod  before the test methods and reference Microsoft VisualStudio QualityTools UnitTestFramework  version 10 0 0 0  runtime version v2 0 50727   I have tried dot-net framework 3 5  4 and 4 5 others give a re-targeting error   I have tried to build the solution and project  Test explorer has the message  Build your solution to discover all available tests  Click  run all  to build  discover  and run all tests in your solution   So the question is  How to I get visual studio to find the tests     Have also tried to follow this  http   msdn microsoft com en-US library ms379625 28v VS 80 29 aspx but with no success  I get stuck in section getting started  when asked to right click and select create tests  There is no create tests     I have this test it compiles  but does not show up in test explorer    using Microsoft VisualStudio TestTools UnitTesting   namespace tests        TestClass      public class SimpleTest            TestMethod          public void Test                 Assert AreEqual  a   a    same                          I have now discovered  see deleted answer below  that it is because it is on a shared drive  but I don t as yet know how to get around it   something about the security setting maybe

User · Answer

Since the project is on a shared drive as the original poster have indicated. VS.NET needs to trust network location before it will load and run your test assemblies. Have a read of this blog post.

To allow VS.NET to load things of a network share one needs to add them (shares) to trusted locations. To add a location to a full trust list run (obviously amend as required for you environment):

 caspol -m -ag 1.2 -url file:///H:/* FullTrust

To verify or list existing trusted locations run:

 caspol -lg

User · Answer

In my case  I had 3 test projects  created with Visual Studio 2017  but I think it doesn t matter   and only two of them were discovered by the Test Explorer  I realized that the third project had a different version of the Microsoft VisualStudio QualityTools UnitTestFramework dll  I updated it in the NuGet Manager and the tests appeared

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None of the solutions here helped me  The tests wouldn t be discovered for one solution whereas another solution referencing the same projects worked fine  I finally solved this by deleting the solutionname v12 suo file

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I ve updated VS 2012 to the Latest Update   ie visual studio update 3  That fixed the issue for me

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The simplest thing you can do is  just drag and drop those files from the File Explorer to the Test project  Build the project again  and you are good to go   OR   Open the  csproj file of your Test project in a text editor and manually include the file name to compile  Search for the Compile tag in the file and add your file which you want to run    lt ItemGroup gt       lt Compile Include  TestSettings cs    gt       lt Compile Include  TestLibrary cs    gt       lt Compile Include  UnitTest1 cs    gt   lt  ItemGroup gt    Add the Compile tag for your file and save it  Now run the tests  Your file with unit test will be detected and run

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Here s another one to add to the list based on user error stupidity     I tried various answers from this question and then realised my test project was unticked in the Configuration Manager  Build menu  Configuration Manager  so it wasn t being built    lt   Posting this in the hope it ll save someone wasting an hour or two as I just did

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I found the best way to troubleshoot this issue is to create a  proj msbuild file and add your unit test projects which you hare having an issue into this file and execute the tests using the command line version of mstest  I found a small configuration issue in my app config which only appeared when running the tests from mstest - otherwise the test project built just fine  Also you will find any indirect reference issues with this method as well  Once you can run the Unit test from the command line using mstest you can then do a clean solution  rebuild solution and your test should be discovered properly

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One issue I ve run into repetitively is not running Visual Studio  explicitly  as Administrator on Windows 8    I tried several of the suggestions listed  but they did not get the unit tests to appear until I ran VS 2013 as Administrator  even though my shortcut is set to open VS that way  either opening the solution file or sometimes clicking the shortcut it doesn t actually open as admin

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I know this is an older question but with Visual Studio 2015 I was having issues where my newly created test class was not being recognized  Tried everything  What ended up being the issue was that the class was not  included in the project   I only found this on restarting Visual Studio and noticing that my test class was not there  Upon showing hidden files  I saw it  as well as other classes I had written  were not included  Hope that helps

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These are all great answers  but there is one more reason that I know of  I just ran into it  In one of my tests I had a ReSharper message indicating that I had an unused private class  It was a class I m going to use in an upcoming test  This actually caused all of my tests to disappear

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A problem I ve found is that tests don t get found in the Test Explorer  nothing shows up  if the solution is running off a network drive   network location   shared drive    You can fix this by adding an environment variable   COMPLUS LoadFromRemoteSources and set its value to 1

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I hit the same problem while trying to open the solution on a network share in VS2013 Ultimate    I corrected the problem by turning on   Control Panel -  Internet Options -   Security  Tab -  Click  Local intranet   click on sites and make sure  Automatically detect intranet network  is ticked

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I ran into the same issue while trying to open the solution on a network share  No unit test would be detected by Test Explorer in this case  The solution turns out to be   Control Panel -  Internet Options -   Security  Tab -  Click  Intranet  and add the server IP address or host name holding the network share to the  Sites  list   After doing this  I recompiled the solution and now tests appeared  This should be quite similar to the answer made by  BigT

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Check that your test project is not set to Delay sign only in your project properties -  Signing  If it is  deselect it and do a clean rebuild

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I encountered the same problem in VS2013 Ultimate  My problem was that I was creating a Windows Service and forgot to uninstall it  So the Service was running and VS couldn t access one of the DLLs which caused that the whole test suite wasn t loaded at all

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I read all the existing answers and found that my  xUnit  tests weren t being discovered because I had removed  unused  references and more specifically  xunit execution desktop  Re-installing the xUnit package fixed the issue in my case

User · Answer

Since none of these answers deal with the cause I encountered  for this problem  I will add my answer here as well   In my case  it was a copy pasting code problem   We had a TestProjectA where there are specific type of tests that we want to pull out to its own test project - TestProjectB   The problem now was that  while tests in TestProjectA continue to show up just fine  the tests in the new TestProjectB aren t showing up in VS Test Explorer - unless you specifically build TestProjectB or manually right click on a test there and run it   The cause was that in copy pasting the code over  some namespaces didn t get updated    There is a TestMethodA   in TestClassA in namespace TestProjectA ModuleA with filepath  TestProjectA TestClassA cs As well as a TestMethodA   in TestClassB in namespace TestProjectA ModuleA with filepath  TestProjectB TestClassB cs   So visual Studio prints out a message in Output window that the TestId for these two are the same  and proceeds to show TestProjectA and not TestProjectB in Test Explorer due to the TestId clashing between the two projects   Correcting the namespace to TestProjectB ModuleB for  TestProjectB TestClassB cs fixed the issue

User · Answer

I was getting the error   Failed to initialize client proxy  could not connect to vstest discoveryengine exe    Try to run Visual Studio as Administrator  That worked for me   There is another Stack Overflow post discussing this error  and the same solution works for them  The question remains why this works

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Adding my answer as this is the top result on Google for this   I m using Visual Studio 2015 and  unknowingly - I just ran Install-Package NUnit  installed the NUnit3 package NuGet to my test project  I already had the NUnit Test Adapter extension installed  and my tests were still not showing up   Installing the NUnit3 Test Adapter through Tools   Extensions and Updates fixed this for me

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This is more to help people who end up here rather than answer the OP s question   Try closing and re-opening visual studio  did the trick for me    Hope this helps someone

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It looks like NUnit Framework 2 6 4 does not work well with NUnit Test Adapter  In the website it mentions the test adapter will only work with NUnit Framework 2 6 3   This was my problem        1  I had downloaded NUnit and NUnit Test Adapter separately through Nuget in the VS2012  Somehow NUnit got updated to 2 6 4 Suddenly i did not see my test cases listed   Fix    Uninstall Nuget and Nuget Test adapter   a  Go to Tools  Nuget   Nuget Pkg manager    Manage Nuget Pkg for Solution  b  List installed packages  c  Click manage  d  Un-check your projects Install NUnit Test Adapter including NUnit 2 6 3 Framework Clean Rebuild solution Open Test   Test Explorer   Run All   I see all the test cases  Hope this helps

User · Answer

Another issue that may prevent tests from being discovered  usually with a message in the Tests output window like    Failed to configure settings for runsettings plugin  VSTest Run Configuration  as it threw following exception   An error occurred while parsing EntityName  Line 1  position 8   Please contact the plugin author    This can be caused by having characters in your path or file names that would need escaping to be parsed as xml   Specifically the  amp  character  as  lt  and   are not allowed in directory or file names   This causes the test discovery to fall over and not identify the tests  but I could still run the tests by hand using Resharper by clicking in the margin

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This one just bit me  I added a test to my project  but could not get it to show up in Test Explorer  My old tests all showed up  Finally  I realized I was only viewing a specific playlist  and I had not added the new test to the playlist  If you are using playlists  select  All Tests  and see if VS finds your tests and displays them in Test Explorer  Then you can add them to the desired playlist  too

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I sometimes get the same symptoms     What I did is  1  Closed the Test Explorer window 2  Cleaned the solution 3  Rebuild the solution 4  Relaunched Test Explorer window from Test -  Windows -  Test Explorer     And I got my test in Test Explorer window

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I was experiencing this issue many times when I try to build the solution in a different PC   I am using NUnit and Specflow as well  By default My test project targets X86 But I have to change this to X64  Steps are 1   Test Menu -  Test Setting -Default Processor Architecture -  x64  2   Clean Build 3   Build  4   If  still tests didn t show up  5   Go to Tools   Extensions and Updates Then Install NUnit and Specflow libraries 6   Clean Build 7   Build   Then usually test will showed up in Test Editor

User · Answer

Quick check list for solving some common test problems  Make sure that    Test class and test methods are public Test class has  TestClass  attribute Test methods have  TestMethod  attribute   If this does not help  try cleaning  rebuilding solution and restarting Visual Studio

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For Me the solution was just a little bit less complicated    I had just brought an existing solution on to my machine  cloned from gitHub  and we do not track the auto-generated  cs files that Visual Studio created   For each feature file there is a  cs file with the same name   Opening the solution without having the associated  cs files actually allow me to navigate to the bound methods  so it appeared as if specflow was wired up properly  but I was not able to view the test names in the Test Explorer    For this problem simply excluding the feature files from the project and then re-including them  forced VS to regenerate these auto generated codebehind files   After that  I was able to view the tests in the test explorer

User · Answer

In My case it was something else  I had installed a package and then uninstall it and reinstall an earlier version  That left a residual configuration runtime asssemblyBinding dependencyIdentity redirecting in my app config  I had to correct it  I figured it out by looking at the Output window and selecting  Tests  in the drop down  The error message was there  This was a pain    I hope it helps someone else

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I copy-pasted the method declaration  which included an input string parameter  Forgot to delete the input parameter     public void ExtractValueFromLineTest string input      test not discovered because of the string input param

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I had same symptoms  but under different circumstances   I had to add one additional step to Peter Lamberg s solution     Clean your solution project   My unittest project targets x64  When I created the project it was originally targeting x86   After switching to x64 all my unit tests disappeared   I had to go to the Test Menu -  Test Setting -Default Processor Architecture -  x64   They still didn t show up   Did a build   Still didn t show up   Finally did a Clean  Then they showed up   I find Clean Solution and Clean to be quite useful at getting the solutions to play ball when setting have changed  Sometimes I have to go to the extreme and delete the obj and bin directories and do a rebuild

User · Answer

This problem seems to have so many different solutions may as well add my own   Close Visual Studio  Rename C  Users username AppData Local Microsoft VisualStudio 12 0 ComponentModelCache to ComponentModelCache old  Run Visual Studio and the component cache will be rebuilt

User · Answer

I had same issue  but a bit different    I was using visual studio 2012  For some reason  only the tests of the initial generated file was running  But tests in another file were not running  Tried out different solutions posted here  did not work    Finally I figured out that I had a private method in the test class which was the first method inside the class  I just moved the private method after a test method  so now  a method with  TestMethod  attribute is the first method inside the class  Strange  but now it works    Hope this helps someone someday

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Visual Studio 2015  v 14       - same problem here  Cause  Different versions of NUnit and NUnit Test Adapter In my case I had the latest versions of both NUnit  3 5  and NUnit Test Adapter but the Test Adapter was not the right one  For NUnit 3 and higher there is a NUnit3TestAdapter that must be used  Solution   Uninstalled the  faulty  NUnint Test Adapter and installed the UNit3TestAdapter v 3 5 0  the latest now is 3 6 0 but didn t use it in order to keep it same as NUnit   After Rebuild of the Solution Tests poped up

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Check referenced assemblies for any assemblies that may have  Copy Local  set to  False    If your test project builds to it s own folder  bin Debug for example  and the project depends on another assembly and one of those assemblies in the References list is marked Copy Local    False   the assembly cannot load due to missing dependencies and your tests will not load after a build

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From menu bar on top     Test -  Run -  All Tests  You may also view all tests from Test Explorer  Test -  Windows -  Test Explorer   Further with VS 2012  if you miss out anything try searching it using Quick Launch bar on top right  Ctrl   Q   Test   Hope this helps

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In my recent experience all of the above did not work  My test method   public async void ListCaseReplace             was not showing up but compiling fine  When I removed the async keyword the test the showed up in the Test Explorer  This is bacause async void is a  fire-and-forget  method  Make the method async Task and you will get your test back   In addition  not having the Test project s configuration set to  Build  will also prevent tests from showing up  Configuration Manager   Check your Test to build

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I had this problem when upgrading my solution from Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Express for Web to Microsoft Visual Studio 2013    I had created a Unit Tests project in 2012  and after opening in 2013 the Unit Test project wouldn t show any tests in the tests explorer  Everytime I tried to run or debug tests it failed  saying the following in the output window       Failed to initialize client proxy       could not connect to vstest discoveryengine x86 exe   I also noticed that on debugging the tests  it was launching an instance of Visual Studio 2012  This clued me into the fact that the Unit Tests project was still referencing 2012  Looking at the test project reference I realised it was targeting the wrong Microsoft Visual Studio Unit Test Framework DLL for this version of Visual Studio   C  Program Files  x86  Microsoft Visual Studio 11 0 Common7 IDE PublicAssemblies Microsoft VisualStudio QualityTools UnitTestFramework dll   I changed the version number from 11 0 to 12 0    C  Program Files  x86  Microsoft Visual Studio 12 0 Common7 IDE PublicAssemblies Microsoft VisualStudio QualityTools UnitTestFramework dll   I rebuilt all and this fixed the issue - all tests were found in the Test Explorer and now all tests are found and running perfectly

User · Answer

You could right-click on a test method and choose the Run Tests  Run unit Tests option  That should bring up the test windows

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We were using xunit and solution worked for me and the team was deleting the folder  TEMP  VisualStudioTestExplorerExtensions  Read this thread   Why is the Visual Studio 2015 2017 Test Runner not discovering my xUnit v2 tests

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Visual Studio Professional 2012  update 4 here  Having Interop function definitions  DllImport extern  in the same project as test classes confused Test Explorer  Moving Interop into a separate project  resolved the issue

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The problem was that the test runner  is configured to not run tests from a remote drive  When I copied the project to a local drive it worked fine  but I needed it on a shared drive  can not remember why     I read that it can be configured to work from a shared drive  but never got to do it as by the time I discovered the solution I had switched to MonoDevelop on Debian

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Tests do not like async methods   Eg        TestMethod      public async void TestMethod1                 TestLib oLib   new TestLib            var bTest   await oLib Authenticate             After doing this        TestMethod      public void TestAuth                 TestMethod1               public async void TestMethod1                 TestLib oLib   new TestLib            var bTest   await oLib Authenticate             It saw the test

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After googling  visual studio can t see tests  it brought me here  so I thought I d share my problem  I could build my solution  and the tests existed  but I could not see them  It turns our it was a quirk of the IDE  that caused the problem  See image below for an explanation and fix

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I had the same problem   In my case it was caused by a private property TestContext   Changing it to the following helped   public TestContext TestContext       get      set      After cleaning and building the solution  as described in  Ourjamie  s answer   the test methods in the affected test class were available in the Test Explorer

User · Answer

Please add the keyword public to your class definition  Your test class is currently not visible outside its own assembly   namespace tests        TestClass      public class SimpleTest            TestMethod          public void Test                 Assert AreEqual  a   a    same

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I have Visual Studio 2012 and i couldn t see the Tests in Test Explorer    So I installed the following  NUnit Test Adapter  That fixed the issue for me

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This sometimes works   Check that the processor architecture under Test menu matches the one you use to build the solution   Test -  Test Settings -  Default Processor Architecture -  x86   x64  As mentioned in other posts  make sure you have the Test Explorer window open  Test -  Windows -  Test Explorer  Then rebuilding the project with the tests should make the tests appear in Test Explorer   Edit  As Ourjamie pointed out below  doing a clean build may also help  In addition to that  here is one more thing I encountered   The  Build  checkbox was unticked in Configuration Manager for a new test project I had created under the solution   Go to Build -  Configuration Manager  Make sure your test project has build checkbox checked for all solution configurations and solution platforms

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I tried all the above and still my Visual Studio 2012 did not show up the tests  In the end I went to a test class and found it had a RootNamespace FolderName and I removed the  FolderName to put the class in the root namespace and bingo all the tests came back   Cannot understand why it was working fine with the original namespace till the other day

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I was experiencing the same issue in Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 on Windows 7 SP1 x64 using a test project targeting the  Any CPU  platform configuration   The problem was that the test project was actually named  Tests  and would disappear the second time the project was  re built   After I renamed the project to  MyProject Tests  for example  the tests no longer disappear

[c#] Why does visual studio 2012 not find my tests?

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