Hi Chris -

Unfortunately the dump file probably won't be of much use to me in narrowing down what is happening here. Have you noticed any pattern to the crash? Does it happen if you use NCrunch on another solution?

Something to try is to set the Use hosted task runner configuration setting to FALSE. This will force NCrunch to use only managed code inside the test process, allowing us to rule out whether the crash is being caused by NCrunch's code.

If you haven't already, I recommend trying the new NCrunch V2 beta. This release contains handling for stack overflows which are known to cause problems such as this when they are thrown by code under test. Stack overflows are the leading cause of crash faults in V1 because they result in the entire test process being torn down, making them painful to try and debug.

If you can isolate a test that is consistently causing this problem, I recommend trying to step into the test with a debugger to see if the explosion happens before your test starts executing, or during its execution.


Thanks!

Remco

Thanks Chris.

The newest version of NCrunch V2, which was released a few hours after I responded to you above, actually has the hosted task runners removed because they were causing problems. If you're still seeing this crash, it's fairly certain that there is no relationship with unmanaged code being executed by NCrunch.

Have you had any luck in narrowing down which test is surfacing the issue? Is it possible for you to step into the test with a debugger?

I'm happy to have a look at the crash dump, but from experience with NCrunch I've found these dumps often show the corrupt state of a process long after the issue has actually appeared, and they do tend to be quite large. If you have a way of sharing it with me, I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to take a look.

Cheers,

Remco

That is very, very strange. The other thing I would suggest is trying to comment out or deduct parts of the code under test to see if you can narrow down what's causing it. Are you executing any unmanaged code with your test?

Unfortunately 18MB is a little too large for the contact form ... this form backs onto a mail server that seems to be struggling with large attachments at the moment. Do you have anywhere else you can store it? Dropbox perhaps?

Ahh sorry. I just re-read your post and realised I must have been cross-eyed (<facepalm>). A link should be no problem. Drop it through the form and I'll be happy to take a look.

Great to hear! Stack overflows can be a bit of a nightmare to track down in a test environment. I guess this was the perfect storm with an overflow appearing inconsistently. I'm glad you tracked it down.

Because it works using instrumentation, NCrunch's stack overflow detection is limited to only picking up overflows that occur within user code. This means that if the overflow is occurring within libraries you're calling into, NCrunch won't be able to detect it and stop it from ripping the test process apart.

Thanks for enjoying NCrunch :)