NCrunch Grid: How to debug error on grid server?

(Using Nunit).
Testing out the grid functionality for the first time.

I get a test error with the unfriendly message "TestFixtureSetUp failed in SomeFixture", so according to http://www.ncrunch.net/documentation/guides_distributed-processing I disabled processing on my local machine by setting "Max no of processing threds" to 0. But when I choose to debug the failing test, it starts debugging it on my (local) server. Maybe debugging on grid nodes isn't supported?

If so, what's the best way to find out the reason of failure? The test never executes, the opening bracket of test method is red indicating test failure, but rest of code is gray, including setups methods.

Thanks.

Hi, thanks for posting.

Unfortunately, remote debugging on grid nodes is not yet supported by NCrunch. Because of this, if you try to debug a test when in 'grid only mode', the projects will build locally and the test will run locally.

Remote debugging is a complex area that requires either a very tricky infrastructure setup, or a large amount of high maintenance integration. It's something I'd been hoping to evaluate in future if the grid features proved to be very popular.

At the moment, the best way I know of to debug code that can only execute on a remote machine is by introducing Debug.Write/Console.Write statements into the code to learn more about how it is behaving. The continuous execution of the code by NCrunch combined with code coverage still makes this a more pleasant experience than it would be to debug tests in this way using a traditional test runner, but I agree it isn't ideal.


Cheers,

Remco