(Lots of intro, as I suspect I may have an X-Y problem...)

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Massive Context and Preamble
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I have a solution which is doing some stuff about opening and using DLLs. Naturally some of that stuff is dependant upon what classes and interfaces are defined within that dll, and I'd like to test that fuctionality.

I could just create some dlls once and store those files as test resources, but I thought it was nicer to add to the sln some .csprojs that would build dlls with the relevant properties for the tests. Thus I have a structure that looks something like this:


> SlnRoot/
>> DLLReader/
>> DLLReader.Tests/
>> DLLTestsSamples/
>>> TestCase1Example/
>>> TestCase2Example/
>>> TestCase3Example/
>> FileStore
>>> TestCase1Example.dll
>>> TestCase2Example.dll
>>> TestCase3Example.dll

The code in DLLReader is expecting to be given a Single Directory which contains all the dlls it's interested in; this is `FileStore`. Each of the TestCase projects builds its dll, and then xcopies it up to FileStore as a post-build step. The test code tells DLLReader about SlnRoot/FileStore and everything is happy.

This all works really nicely when run by VS native Testing, or by Resharper.
But when I run it in NCrunch, it all falls apart.

If I've previously built the project in VS, then when running in NCrunch I can locate the `.GetOriginalSolutionPath()` and find the FileStore which will have the dlls in, and that all works.
But if NCrunch is the thing doing the build then the TestCase projects dont copy their dlls to the FileStore. I would like NCrunch to be able to do ALL the work itself, if necessary - it seems bad to write a project where the test will work (soto voce... but only if you've explicitly done a build in VS beforehand )

At the first level this is because the post-build doesn't run at all :) but if I actively turn post-build ON in NCrunch, then the post build is running in NCrunch's copy of the whole solution file system, which is subtly differently laid out. Notably, there's an extra layer of folders before you get to a common root, and FileStore itself hasn't been copied over at all.

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Actual Question
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I think what I want is to be able to tell NCrunch to please do actually build the original solution and run its post-build steps (in situ, on the original solution). If necessary it can do that as well as runing its own build, but I do need it to run the original post-builds, in the original folders.

A) Can I do that?
B) If I can't what is the idiomatic NCrunch way to solve this problem, or to restructure things so that I don't have this problem.

Yes, indeed. Further this is a logical dependency, not merely an implementation detail ... Those tests are literally intended to depend on those TestCase Projects :)
I have already added build dependencies in the solution between the relevant projects, so that building the Test project forces a build of the TestCase Projects (i.e. lines in the .sln file)

Is this what you meant by


Or doing you mean that the references need to be defined on the csproj - as if it were referencing a library or directly calling another projects public classes?

Thanks for pointing me towards GetAllAssemblyLocations and/or GetImplicitlyReferencedAssemblyLocations; I'll give them a go.

Assuming I can get to a point where my test helper can see the files ... Are you recommending that I do the copying into a single folder within the test setup? Or that I re-write the code interface to so taht the test file fetcher gets each relevant file from its own sub-directory at the relevant point?

Thanks Remco, that's all working perfectly now.

I started with code to copy into the core folder, as the first step to get the tests passing, then did some heavy duty refactoring to end up with a PathProvider dependency, which gets a injected differently if NCrunch is active and uses that GetAllAssemblyReferences method.

Thanks for the help!