Why is the Visual Studio 2015 2017 2019 Test Runner not discovering my xUnit v2 tests

Question

UPDATE  Adding a 2019  the discovery runner integration mechanism is same as per 2017  amp  2015  so the key things that can go wrong are the same     I ve read Why is the xUnit runner not finding my tests  which covers reasons xUnit would never be able to find your tests but my problem is different - I m confident there s nothing subtle going on with my tests   they have worked in other environments  this seems to be just my machine  - the Visual Studio Test Runner in Visual Studio 2015  Community Edition  is simply not showing any of my tests  I m not doing anything remotely exciting  the tests target xUnit net v2 on the Desktop   I ve looked in the Output window and am not seeing anything in at all under Test in the Show output from tabs

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I can provide a solution for an edge case I ran into a few days ago. It's not gonna be the solution that fits all of the scenarios described above, however, for the edge case I had it fixed it.

I had the same issue with most recent VS 2017 (version 15.5.7) and XUnit 2.3.1. The xunit.runner.visualstudio package was installed, however, the tests didn't show up in VisualStudio's built-in test explorer.

I was working on a legacy project that was targeting .NET framework 4.5. However, beginning with version 2.2. XUnit does not support .NET frameworks lower thant 4.5.2 (see Release Notes - XUnit 2.2: February 19, 2017

Changing the test project's target framework to a version >= 4.5.2 worked for me. You don't have to change the project's version that you're testing, it's just about the test project itself.

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I Cleared Temp   Temp  and Prefetch  Then tried reopening VS and was able to find the test methods

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My problem was resolved by installing the nuget xunit runner visualstudio

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I have test project A and B  Tests in Project A where discovered but the Discovery never stopped for B  I had to manually kill TestHost to make stop   I did a lot of things this page describes even to the point that I m unsure as to wheter this was the solution    Now it worked and the thing I did was to open the Solution and NOT have the Test Explorer up  Instead I just checked the Output window for Tests and I could see the discovery process end and the number of test where equal to A B  After this  I opened the Test Explorer and then both A and B where present  So   Uninstall and Install the latest xUnit stuff correctly  Delete the  temp  as mentioned above  Add NuGet Package  Microsoft TestPlatform TestHost  Add NuGet Package  Microsoft NET Test Sdk   restart but only check the Tests Output  If it works u ll see

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I had many projects of different type in my solution and I could not run the Xunit test project  I unloaded all of them except my Xunit project and then rebuild the solution the tests appeared in visual studio and I could run them

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After spending 2 days    none of the above worked for me  The only  solution  was  Go to project properties -  Build Tab  Then click Advanced button on the right bottom corner of the pane  Change  Debug Info   to  full  and click OK    Here are the screen shots

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Make your test class as public and add annotation as  TestClass

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I ve been struggling with this all afternoon whilst working with an ASP Core project and xUnit 2 2 0  The solution for me was adding a reference to Microsoft DotNet InternalAbstractions  I found this out when trying to run the test project manually with dotnet test which failed but reported that InternalAbstractions was missing  I did not see this error in the test output window when the auto discovery failed  The only info I saw in the discovery window was a return code  which didn t mean anything to me at the time  but in hindsight was probably indicating an error

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In my case  I created a new  Solution Configuration  like shown in the image  So when I select my custom one as  Prod   it doesnt recognize TestMehods for some reason  Changing back to  Debug  solves the problem

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I tried most of the suggestions above and nothing worked  In my case  I m on a team and tests were appearing for other devs for the same solution  So  I attempted just deleting my  vs folder  but no luck there either    I ended up deleting my local folder entirely and re-cloning the repo  That solved it for me

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In my case I have multiple test projects in the same solution  and only one of the projects was not displaying the  Test Explorer    I went to the  Manage Nuget Package for Solution  by right-clicking on the solution   I noticed under the  Consolidate  tab there was some  Test  nuget packages that were out of sync between the projects  I clicked on  Install  and my missing tests showed up

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I had the same issue with Visual Studio 2019  Just Installed the following NuGet packages and the issue was solved   1   xUnit    2   xunit runner visualstudio   3   Microsoft TestPlatform TestHost  4   Microsoft NET Test Sdk

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The reason in my case was the target build was not the same between project debugger and test runner  To unify those elements    Test Test Settings Default Processor Architecture  then select either X64 or X86  Project  your project Properties Build tab  platform target    After they are identical  rebuild your solution then test methods will appear for you

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There is one other reason that can cause Test Explorer not showing any tests  and it has to do with the new portable  pdb file format introduced with Visual Studio 2017   for  NET Core which can break some VS tooling   Background  See the bug report  Mono Cecil causes OutOfMemoryException with new  csproj PDBs     Are your tests not found because of the new portable  pdb  debug symbols  format    Open the Output window  Change drop-down selection for Show output from to Tests  If you see output like to the following  possibly repeated once for each of your tests   then you ve got the problem described in this answer   Exception System OutOfMemoryException  Exception converting  lt SignatureOfYourTestMethod gt  Array dimensions exceeded supported range     If yes  do this to resolve the problem    Open your test project s Properties  select the test project in Solution Explorer and press Alt Enter   Switch to the Build tab  Click on the Advanced    button  located at the very end of that tab page   In the drop-down labelled Debugging information  choose none  pdb-only  or full  but NOT portable  It is this last setting that causes the tests to not be found  Click OK and clean  amp  rebuild your project  If you want to be extra sure  go to your test project s output directory and clean all  pdb files before rebuilding  Now your tests should be back

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None of the above solutions worked for me  dotnetcore 1 1  VS2017   Here s what fixed it    Add NuGet Package Microsoft TestPlatform TestHost Add NuGet Package Microsoft NET Test Sdk   Those are in addition to these packages I installed prior    xunit  2 3 0-beta1-build3642   xunit runner visualstudio  2 3 0-beta1-build1309

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Also check if a completely empty app config file  completely blank with absolutely no markup  is within the test project  This was the culprit in my case

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Ran into a similar problem with VS not discovering test methods  In my case I had the static keyword with the method  which I removed and it worked    TestMethod   Before  public static void Test1    After  public void Test1

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This can also be due to the build check box not being ticked for the current platform project in the build configuration   Click Build   Configuration manager  then make sure the test projects have a tick in the build column for the platform that you re using  for example  x86     This was definitely the solution that worked for me

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Do make sure that you haven t written your unit tests in a  NET Standard 2 0 Class Library  The visualstudio runner does not support running tests in netstandard2 0 class libraries at the time of this writing   Check here for the Test Runner Compatibility matrix   https   xunit github io  runners

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Install xunit runner visualstudio package for the test project

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I am using xUnit 2 2 0   My issue was my solution was not able to find certain dlls and app config was trying to resolve them  The error was not showing up in the test output window in Visual Studio    I was able to identify the error when I installed xunit runner console and tried to run the tests through command line    How to run xunit tests in CLI

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I was suffering from this problem for long times    I had about 100 projects different version was deployed in different server  Updating xunit from 2 2 0 to 2 3 1 was not a solution because build was failing in 2 3 1    Then I just updated xunit runner visualstudio to 2 3 1 and everything started to work fine  I have used this command in my package manager console to updated my xunit runner visualstudio package  Get-Project ComapanyName ProjectName   Tests   Install-Package xunit runner visualstudio -Version 2 3 1

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It s happened to me a couple of times - when I Clean the project and Build it again it tends to be fine

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Follow this steps     Update your MsTest TestAdapter and MsTest TestFramework dll s from nugget package manager  Clean your solution Build your solution

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Make sure that your test class is public

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It was that easy for me - the class which contains the test methods must be public

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Disclaimer  it is not about xunit with visual studio 2015  but Visual Studio 2017 with a UWP unit test application  MSTest   I got to this thread searching the same thing so maybe someone else will do the same     The solution for me was to update the nuget packages for MSTest TestAdapter and MSTest TestFramework  It seems that when you create a unit test app for UWP you don t automatically get the latest versions

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Eliminate discovery exceptions from your inquiries  go to the output Window  Ctrl-Alt-O   then switch the show output from dropdown  Shift-Alt-S  to Tests and make sure there are no discovery exceptions  Test Test settings Default processor architecture can help if your tests are x86 x64 specific and discovery is triggering bittedness-related exceptions  i e  not AnyCpu As suggested in this answer upvote it if the technique helps  running the desktop console runner  instructions  can be a good cross check to eliminate other possibilities  e g  mangled config files -      packages xunit runner console 2 2 0 tools xunit console  lt tests dll gt     NOTE The xunit runner console package is deprecated - when you get stuff working in VS  you ll be able to have dotnet test run them in CI contexts too     Go read the documentation - it s comprehensive  up to date  includes troubleshooting info and takes PRs -     Important note  If you ve previously installed the xUnit net Visual Studio Runner VSIX  Extension   you must uninstall it first  The Visual Studio runner is only distributed via NuGet now  To remove it  to go Tools   Extensions and Updates  Scroll to the bottom of the list  and if xUnit net is installed  uninstall it  This will force you to restart Visual Studio       If you re having problems discovering or running tests  you may be a victim of a corrupted runner cache inside Visual Studio  To clear this cache  shut down all instances of Visual Studio  then delete the folder  TEMP  VisualStudioTestExplorerExtensions  Also make sure your project is only linked against a single version of the Visual Studio runner NuGet package  xunit runner visualstudio     The following steps worked for me     Only if you suspect there is a serious mess on your machine - in general the more common case is that the visual studio integration is simply not installed yet    Do the DEL  TEMP  VisualStudioTestExplorerExtensions as advised  -  PS gt  del  env TEMP VisualStudioTestExplorerExtensions Install the NuGet Package xunit runner visualstudio in all test projects   Paket     paket paket add nuget xunit runner visualstudio -i   You need to end up with the following in your paket dependencies   nuget xunit runner visualstudio version in path  true  Note the version in path  true bit is important  Nuget  Go to Package Manager Console  Alt-T N O  and   Install-Package xunit runner visualstudio     Rebuild to make sure xunit runner ends up in the output dir Close Test Explorer  lt - this was the missing bit for me Re-open Test Explorer  Alt-S W T  Run All tests  Ctrl R  A

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The most common culprit for me has been Visual Studio trying to run the tests using a different architecture than the library it s testing  Unfortunately there are multiple places where it seems this can go wrong   In VS 2017  try creating a Run Settings file  e g  Default runsettings in your test project  If your main lib is x64  the contents should be    lt  xml version  1 0  encoding  utf-8   gt   lt RunSettings gt     lt RunConfiguration gt       lt TargetPlatform gt x64 lt  TargetPlatform gt     lt  RunConfiguration gt   lt  RunSettings gt    Then choose this file from Test -  Test Settings -  Select Test Settings File   Then  under Test -  Test Settings  Default Processor Architecture  choose the correct architecture again   Be sure to Clean and Build the entire solution  You may need to close and reopen the Test Explorer window  Look for any additional errors in the Output -  Test window  for more clues about incorrect architecture types   FYI additional Test Settings entries can be found here

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Happend to me when i took my first first walking attempts with IntelliTest in VS 2017   Sometimes  when the test project gets auto-created by IntelliTest  the assembly reference to Microsoft ExtendedReflection      Program Files  x86  Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise Common7 IDE Extensions Microsoft Pex Microsoft ExtendedReflection dll  is missing  When added  the generated Tests will show up in test explorer after recompile

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Here is the solution that worked for us  Not the best but maybe one can benefit   Background    Our scripts were developed with VS 2013 and used NUnit VS Adapter 2 1   Recently we migrated to VS 2017 and when open the same solution - test wouldn t show in the Test Explorer   Upon Build we would see this message    Informational  NUnit Adapter 3 10 0 21  Test discovery starting  Informational  Assembly contains no NUnit 3 0 tests  C  ihealautomatedTests SeleniumTest bin x86 Debug SeleniumTest dll  Informational  NUnit Adapter 3 10 0 21  Test discovery complete   Solution  temporary     Uninstall  NUnit Adapter 3 10    Install NUnit VS Adapter 2 1     Now the Tests are shown

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In my case  I had 2 different test projects in the solution   Project 1 tests could be found  but Project 2 tests could not   I found that first Unloading the test Project 1  then closing VS   clearing my temp files   re-open solution   rebuild  allowed VS to discover my Project 2 tests   I m assuming something must be conflicting between the two test projects and this was the quickest way to get me up and running in a few minutes   The kinks can be worked out later

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I had to change the Test Settings after changing the test projects CPU to x64  Then the tests where detected again

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You need to update your all packages when you are move VS2015 to VS2017 for discover test in test explorer

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I don t know if some of you also use JustMock  but I had to disable the profiler in VS 2017 for test detection to work

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Close all Visual Studio instances Go to  TEMP  VisualStudioTestExplorerExtensions  Delete specrun related folders Try again   let me know  thanks

[.net] Why is the Visual Studio 2015/2017/2019 Test Runner not discovering my xUnit v2 tests

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