Stuck at "ncrunch engine is initialising"

Hi there,

I have upgraded my Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2022 (64-bit) - Preview to Version 17.2.0 Preview 1.0 recently.

Now, all the solutions are stuck at "NCrunch engine is initialising" message. N at bottom right is spinning around in blue forever and no projects or tests are found. I am not sure if it's related to above upgrade entirely though.

The issue is happening in multiple solutions (all dotnet core).

I am not sure if I can post a screenshot, but, my NCrunch Tests pane is essentially empty.

I tried restarting VStudio and PC as well as triggering restarting the NCrunch engine and running the NCrunch wizard.

I will also submit an NCrunch bug report with the same title as this thread, so that you can perhaps see some inner logs and investigate further.

Sometimes, after a very long while, NCrunch stops processing but can't find any test. Message I see at the top is: "No tests are queued for execution. Monitoring no tests, with no tests ignored." In that solution, there are tests of course. Both NUnit and XUnit.

Hi, thanks for sharing this issue.

I've successfully reproduced this problem under the new preview build of VS2022 (17.2.0 preview 1).

The issue appears intermittently, so sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. The cause appears to be a change made to the threading model in the VS project system. Essentially, the project system throws a locking exception when critical elements of projects in the system are read, claiming that a read lock is not enough. This looks like a preview bug to me, so I would prefer to avoid implementing messy workarounds in NCrunch before knowing whether MS continue to maintain this behaviour outside of a preview build.

So in short, we can't support this build of VS right now and will monitor the problem. For the time being, please roll back to a non preview build of VS.

This is also what I saw in this thread... https://forum.ncrunch.net/yaf_postst3195_VS2022--17-1-0--Preview-2-0-appears-to-break-Ncrunch.aspx The behaviour has definitely "come and gone" across different preview versions. At the moment I've reverted to the non-preview of VS2022 which appears to work ok.

I just submitted a bug report probably related to this too (VS 2022 17.2 Preview 1) before I saw this thread.
I'm going to downgrade and see if it's ok on latest RTM build

EDIT: Seems good on 17.1

I moved away from preview and happy now. (I wasn't aware non-preview/real 2022 is already out there :) ).

Thanks a lot.

Now working in 17.2.0 Preview 2.0

arkiaconsulting wrote:Now working in 17.2.0 Preview 2.0

Actually, it's been working for one day only... :-(

Looks like there is a workaround:
- Close VS
- Remove the `.vs` hidden solution folder
- re-launch VS

And nCrunch is back (tested on 17.2.0 Preview 2.0)

arkiaconsulting wrote:Looks like there is a workaround:
- Close VS
- Remove the `.vs` hidden solution folder
- re-launch VS

And nCrunch is back (tested on 17.2.0 Preview 2.0)

Thank you! I just did this on 17.2.0 Preview 4 and it worked. Lifesaver!

Even better workaround: you may disable the preview feature:

Use the project cache to speed solution load

.

That way, the file

***.metadata.v2

under the folder

.vs/ProjectEvaluation

(which is actually the reason why nCrunch is unable to load) doesn't get created.

>Even better workaround: you may disable the preview feature:

Thanks so much - tried this on preview 6 and it seems to do the trick.

@Remco

Now that 17.2 RTM(https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/visual-studio-2022-17-2-is-now-available/) has been released, will NCrunch support the new/preview feature that caused trouble in the preview version?
I haven't got time to check if it works or not.

Br

UppSol wrote:
Now that 17.2 RTM(https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/visual-studio-2022-17-2-is-now-available/) has been released, will NCrunch support the new/preview feature that caused trouble in the preview version?
I haven't got time to check if it works or not.

Yes. I implemented a workaround for this problem yesterday, as it was looking like it would be in the RTM. I was also hoping for another week to add features, but it looks like v4.13 is now going to need to be released as soon as possible.

Hmm, so I just got here because I innocently upgraded VS to 17.2 and now NCrunch is not working anymore.

I followed the advise to deactivate the "Use project cache..." feature *AND* deleted the *.metadata file in .vs/ProjectEvaluation, but it still doesn't work. And, interestingly, when I restart VS, while the feature still shows as deactivated, the metadata file is back.

Any idea what I can do short of downgrading VS?

Aha, in my case, I had to delete the while ProjectEvaluation folder, not just the metadata file, in addition to deactivating the feature.

A workaround for this problem has been implemented in NCrunch v4.12, which is now available for download.

Remco wrote:A workaround for this problem has been implemented in NCrunch v4.12, which is now available for download.

Great support, as always!

Thank you very much 👍

MaxRonin wrote:Hmm, so I just got here because I innocently upgraded VS to 17.2 and now NCrunch is not working anymore.

I followed the advise to deactivate the "Use project cache..." feature *AND* deleted the *.metadata file in .vs/ProjectEvaluation, but it still doesn't work. And, interestingly, when I restart VS, while the feature still shows as deactivated, the metadata file is back.

Any idea what I can do short of downgrading VS?

Same! The upgrade to 4.13 solved it for me but my license is expired so I am on 30 day evaluation until my IT department purchases a license.
My company was acquired so will see how IT reacts to the request.
I can not live without my NCrunch! Past few days have been so frustrating until I finally had a chance to goog and found this thread

arthgg wrote:
Same! The upgrade to 4.13 solved it for me but my license is expired so I am on 30 day evaluation until my IT department purchases a license.
My company was acquired so will see how IT reacts to the request.
I can not live without my NCrunch! Past few days have been so frustrating until I finally had a chance to goog and found this thread

Sorry to hear you got caught by this. We do aim for future compatibility as much as possible, but sometimes changes deep within VS can break us without warning.

If you aren't able to update your license, I recommend rolling back to an earlier version of VS. There are also some workarounds that can keep you going at least temporarily (discussed in the thread above).