Hi,

NCrunch.exe carries with it integration with all supported versions of VS. By default, it will use the highest available version of VS installed on the machine. You can force it to use a specific version of VS/MSBuild using the /VS command line parameter, for example:

NCrunch.exe mysolution.sln /VS 2015

Note that if the tool is connecting to grid nodes that don't have the same version of VS installed, the grid node will fall back to the closest available version.

Under v2.26, the disabling of grid nodes is actually stored in the .v2.ncrunchsolution.user file in binary form. This has been changed in v3, where it is now stored in .v3.ncrunchsolution.user in text form instead.

Unfortunately, the machine running NCrunch.exe will usually need to have the same version of MSBuild installed as is intended to be used on the grid node servers.

This is because NCrunch.exe still needs to load the projects on its local machine before it can farm out the work to connected nodes. The act of loading projects requires integration with MSBuild.

It's possible in some cases for the version of MSBuild to be different between NCrunch.exe and the grid node, but as you've noted VS2015 contains several language changes that make interoperability difficult here. VS2015 also introduced some changes to the build system that make it impossible for projects to be loaded on a prior version of MSBuild then built on a later version. This means that if VS2015 is involved, you'll need to have the versions consistent between the console tool and the grid node. When using only older versions of VS/MSBuild, there is still a chance that it may work through the grid node's fallback system.