I have a solution with sixty projects that with CopyReferencedAssembliesToWorkspace set to false will compile a fair number of the projects successfully but will fail for certain projects. When I set CopyReferencedAssembliesToWorkspace to true nearly all of the projects will compile successfully. I'd like to get that issue resolved but I'd like to focus on the first issue.

The first error NCrunch gives me when I have CopyReferencedAssembliesToWorkspace set to false is a Test project can't find a reference to an assembly. Yet that reference is one of the projects that NCrunch built successfully.

Is there something in my solution that NCrunch isn't liking that I could change (and how do I figure out what to change)?

Or is this a problem with NCrunch as the solution builds fine in Visual Studio?

I've read the https://www.ncrunch.net/...ing_project-build-issues but I'm not understanding what steps I can take to try and resolve this issue.

What is included in the bug report? I'd like to go over it before submitting it to see if I need to sanitize it.

I'll take a look at that and see what it contains and see if I can send it out.

I was able to narrow the problem down to two specific files in the failing test project. The test project included an accessor:
<Shadow Include="Test References\OtherProject.accessor" />

When I changed the shadow to none it stopped giving me the reference error. I haven't looked up what this shadow versus none means, any ideas?

Visual Studio and Ncrunch then both gave compilation errors about a test that were using the accessor. After commenting out those tests I was able to get Visual Studio and Ncrunch to work on that test project.

Thanks, I've looked into this in detail and it makes sense to me now.

The MSTest accessors that are used to access private methods work by generating a new assembly in order to access them. This isn't a problem when all assemblies exist in the same directory (such as when the copy referenced assemblies setting is turned on), but the step fails if the assemblies exist in different areas of the disk.

Unfortunately there isn't much I can do to make this work without using the copy referenced assemblies setting. Microsoft never designed this feature to work with the default way NCrunch handles its builds. I recommend avoiding test accessors where possible, otherwise the copy referenced assemblies to workspace setting is an unfortunate necessity.

I'll make a note to add some auto configuration to a future version of NCrunch so that the copy referenced assemblies setting is turned on automatically when test accessors are detected - at the very least, this should make the configuration more intuitive.

Thanks again for reporting this problem.