Hi,

Thanks for sharing these issues. I'm going to try to separate them from each other so we can troubleshoot them independently.

1. Debug related issues: NCrunch is reliant on custom debug metadata that is emitted by the compiler for async methods and yield iterator blocks. When Roslyn was first released, there were a range of issues where the new custom debug metadata was not being handled correctly by NCrunch and it was being stripped from the .PDB. To my knowledge, all these issues have been since fixed, but MS are constantly changing the the custom metadata formats and it wouldn't surprise me if there's a new hole as a result of a VS update. If you can share a code sample of an async block that consistently blocks your access to local variables, I'd really like to take a closer look at it.

2. Command window popups: NCrunch isn't responsible for creating any visible console windows during its execution, but it does execute user code which may be responsible for doing this. v2.20 introduced a change to the NCrunch task runners where they are now classified as windows applications rather than console applications, and there has been another user that has reported that they're now seeing console windows pop up during test execution. My gut feel is that the change may have had some kind of knock-on behaviour where console windows spawned by test/production code are now becoming visible where they previously weren't. I recommend selectively running your tests until you can find the code responsible for spawning the console window. If you can describe to me how this code is working, I'll investigate whether it's worth reversing the change in v2.20.

Ok, I put together an example WebAPI project with EF that was a simpler version of a similarly architected project as our production product. I couldn't reproduce it. I then loaded our product and everything was working fine, async and non-async tests. So, it being the weekend, I naturally started to do some work. :) After a couple hours it quit working again. No tests loaded debug symbols. I rebooted and they started working again. Not sure if this helps. Is there a debug dump or anything I can pull/look at when it stops working to help debug this?

It's definitely intermittent. It seems to correspond with the lack of a popup window. When the Window is popping up fairly regularly then everything works, but when the window stops debug symbols fail to load. But, this is all anecdotal since I can't test that scenario. I let NCrunch run continuously and detect when a test is impacted by a change. Over the weekend I was able to fix it by rebooting my machine, I'll play with it more today and see if restarting VS will also fix it. I am using Postsharp, and I have the tool dll correctly loaded as an additional dependency in NCrunch config. That's one thing I didn't use in my test project, so perhaps it is related. When it fails again today I'll check the PDB and report back.