Hi, thanks for posting!

The first thing that always comes to mind when I hear about intermittent build errors is to try removing as much complexity from your build process as possible. This means that if you're using custom build steps or 3rd party frameworks, try disabling these to see if the problem goes away. Make sure you don't have any absolute path references from your code that could reach out of the NCrunch workspace and go back to the original (unshadowed) solution.

NCrunch doesn't really 'know' anything about source control in itself, so most likely there's been another change (or something related that's been affected) beyond your removal of files from source control.

Note that NCrunch won't automatically restore nuget packages if it is enabled without them being present. This can create an interesting situation where NCrunch workspaces can exist without the files, requiring a full foreground rebuild of your solution (so that nuget can restore the references), then a Reset of the NCrunch engine in order to fix.

Hi Jason -

NCrunch deliberately disables Nuget package restore as part of its own build process, as this feature introduces serious performance problems within NCrunch.

Essentially, Nuget package restore involves the build process reaching out to the Nuget server and downloading any missing packages. Because NCrunch creates many workspaces for an open solution, this activity is then performed many times and NCrunch builds grind to a halt. This is a design issue between the ways that NCrunch and Nuget both work, and there is no feasible way to solve this problem in the tools themselves.

When using NCrunch on a solution where you rely on Nuget package restore, ensure you always first perform a Visual Studio build so that Nuget can download the package dependencies before you turn on NCrunch. In this way you shouldn't experience any problems.


Cheers,

Remco

Hi Jay,

Use Build Configuration does allow you to inject a custom $(Configuration) property into the NCrunch build, but there is a better way for your to introduce conditional build logic when using NCrunch.

Try the $(NCrunch) environment variable. For example:
Condition="'$(NCrunch)' == '1'"


Cheers,

Remco

Hi Jay -

I'm pleasantly surprised that this works ... so much so that I may add it as a feature. Can you show me the code you've injected into the project file? I'd really like to take a closer look.


Thanks!

Remco

@Remco

Sorry for the long delay. It turns out that in my investigation, the reason Visual Studio kept downloading NuGet packages automatically when opening the solution was because it had detected a change had been done to the project file.

So there's no magic msbuild tasks that'll automatically restore packages, but if you were to implement any change to the project file structure, even a timestamp, that would force Visual Studio to magically restore all referenced NuGet packages. Hint, hint.

On a side note, is there any chance NCrunch can send another parameter to MSBuild, which would be the original Solution directory for which NCrunch is now building. I realise that NCrunch creates a copy of the project, but it would help me restore NuGet packages if I was able to know the original solution directory that the copy was take from.

Jay