Unit Tests Not Found in VS2012 and How It Was Fixed (partially)

I am setting up a virtual machine for a new upcoming project. It will use some core libraries that have already been developed in-house with Visual Studio 2012 as the development environment. The team that developed the existing libraries did a good job to make sure there was a suite of unit tests that worked and was reasonably comprehensive. So, after I installed VS2012 and Resharper I retrieved the code from the repository, compiled it and tried to run the unit tests.

The Resharper test runner (the one I normally use) listed all the tests and reported their status as "Inconclusive. Test not run."

The test runner built into Visual Studio didn't list any tests at all. Zip. Nada. Nothing.

A web search revealed some posts indicating there was a compatibility issue between VS2012 and Resharper that was supposedly fixed in VS2012's Update 2. I downloaded and installed the update.

After this, Resharper listed all the tests and reported their status as "Pending" without doing anything further. A change, but arguably not as good as before. To exit with things pending just seems strange. At least the previous "Inconclusive" state gives a sense that something's wrong, even if it doesn't say what.

On the other hand, Microsoft's test runner... still did the same thing. Absolutely no indication that any tests even existed.

After quite a bit more searching, chanting various incantations and sacrificing not a few livestock, I stumbled upon an ancient forum post from early last summer when VS2012 was still gestating as an RC. It indicated there was a bug with unit tests when they existed on a network share.

Hmm. I wanted my VM to be just the build environment and had placed the source code on a shared folder that was mapped alongside all the other source code on the host machine's disk. I wondered what would happen if I moved the code to the C: drive.

As soon as I loaded the project from its new location on C:, Microsoft's test runner immediately found and ran the tests.

Unfortunately, Resharper's still doesn't work. It continues to set them to "pending" and never does anything else. Apparently this is a known issue that hopefully will be fixed soon.

(Hopefully I've added enough keywords to this that others will be able to find this problem and solution without having to spill blood all over the keyboard.)

Sharing folders with Windows 8 between VirtualBox machines

Currently Windows 8 runs just fine inside a VirtualBox machine. However, guest additions, the tools to enable certain useful features of VirutalBox, do not yet work with Windows 8. Today I wanted to use some Visual Studio projects from an existing Windows XP virtual machine in my new Windows 8 machine. The obvious first choice was to simply use a shared folder on the host in both virtual machines. However, this requires the guest additions, so I went looking for a work around.

What I found to work was a second virtual hard drive. In VirtualBox, on my primary development machine, I created a new hard drive on the existing IDE controller. I then started the machine and went into Windows' device manager. The disk manager started the new disk wizard. After initialization, I created and formatted an NTFS partition. I then copied the files I wanted to work with to this new disk. Finally I shutdown this machine.

Next, in VirturalBox, I added the same, new hard drive image as a second drive on the Window 8 box's SATA controller. (If you add the drive to the IDE controller, Windows 8 will try to boot to it first and fail with a bad image error.) When I booted Windows 8 and went into Explorer, the second drive showed up with all the data I'd copied to it.

That's it, pretty simple and straight forward, but not the obvious (to me) first solution.

Warning: I don't know what would happen if both virtual machines are run at the same time. I suspect (and hope) the second one started would get some sort of sharing violation and not allow the disk to be mounted. I can't imagine VirtualBox is smart enough to allow two machines to attach to the same vdi file at the same time without corrupting the data. However, it seems to work just fine as long as there is only one machine using the file at any given point of time.

Hope this helps someone.

How to install Jolicloud in a VirtualBox

I ran across Jolicloud today as I surfed around the internet. It sounded like a competitor to Google's Chromium operating system and sounded interesting. Just for investigation purposes, I wanted to install it in a VirtualBox virtual machine so went to Jolicloud's download page. It gave a page of instructions that indicated I needed to download an operating system specific application and an ISO file. The application would use the ISO file build a bootable thumb drive. This drive could then install Jolicloud on the target notebook.

Not wanting to go through this hassle for a virtual machine, nor knowing if I could even boot a virtual machine with a thumb drive, I searched for instructions for a non-thumb drive install. I found several sites but apparently, they were for an earlier build that had some other bootstrap process. They mentioned using an .img file (which the current download doesn't have) and going through a number of different steps to convert it to something the VirtualBox software could read. These directions didn't seem to be appropriate for the current version. (These sites indicated they were for an Alpha release that required an invitation. At the time of this writing, the version is a PreBeta and does not require an invitation.)

I let the problem percolate in the back of my brain for a bit as I worked on other things. At some point, I realized the current build uses an ISO file. I wondered, "What are the odds that image is bootable?" Figuring the odds were good, I downloaded all 600 megabytes of it.

When the download finished, I used VirtualBox's normal creation wizard to create a simple virtual machine (512MB memory, 4GB virtual hard drive, Ethernet bridged to the host's NIC). I mounted the ISO image as the CD drive and set it as the boot drive with the virtual, empty hard drive second. When I started the machine, it booted just fine and presented a standard startup screen giving me several options, one of which was to install to the hard drive. From this point on, it proceeded as a typical install. The only things the install wanted from me were the language, keyboard layout, time zone and user information. When done, it shutdown. I unmounted the ISO file from the CD drive and turned the machine back on. Everything seems to be working perfectly so far. For whatever it's worth, it does seem to be faster than Chromium running in another, identically configured virtual machine.

That's it. Very painless. Everything just worked.