Yes. Prior to running NCrunch over your solution inside your build, you should always perform a restore step on the solution itself.

In older versions we used to do this while loading projects, but it proved to be extremely inefficient to do this and was better done inside the user's build system itself. So we deactivated it.



This is a leftover message from when we used to do this automatically. Presently there is no configuration setting to turn the package restore mode on, as we couldn't really see why anyone would want it.



Thanks, I think we can improve on this. We'll take a look :)



Presently, MSBuild is being versioned alongside VS itself. Historically, this hasn't always been the case. However, there is more to NCrunch's environment than just MSBuild. We do have a number of internal workarounds and code targeted to specific cases that behave differently under different versions of VS. Given that the primary use case of NCrunch is still as a Visual Studio plugin, the ability to differentiate behaviour based on VS version still makes more sense from an implementation standpoint than selecting a version of MSBuild. However, I do understand that it seems pretty weird to be passing in a /VS parameter when you don't have VS installed on the machine and you only really care about MSBuild. Part of the issue here is that the console tool still owes its roots to an engine that was originally only intended to be used as part of VS.

The code that searches for the build system should usually be able to find the MSBuild tools in place of VS. You might be interested to know that the method of finding these tools is actually the same as VS (they are internally represented as a version of VS). If this discovery code doesn't work, you can override it by setting the environment variable 'NCrunchVSInstallPath.VS2019' to the directory 3 levels below the path containing MSBuild.exe. So for example, if your MSBuild is at 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Enterprise\MSBuild\Current\Bin', then you would set this value to 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Enterprise'.