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I am having Issues debugging unit tests in visual studio. I can run them fine from test explorer. The issue is that I cannot step into the code and debug. Also, I am able to debug other parts of the code that are not unit tests.

When I right click on the test from test explorer and click debug I get a loading dialog saying "Loading symbols for vstest.executionengine.x86.exe from f:\biniaries\vset\mstestexecutor.x8g.csproj_1420192002\objr\x86". After a few more of these the test stops running and I get the following error displayed in the output window under "Tests". 

  ------ Run test started ------
  Failed to initialize client proxy: could not connect to .
  ========== Run test finished: 0 run (0:01:05.45) ==========

I have tried the following:

  • Set new directory for the "Cache symbols in this directory" setting.
  • Reinstalled VS2012 with Update 3
  • Running with the safemode switch
  • Ran the vs2012 repair tool
user2577788
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6 Answers6

29

In my case I found that I needed to run visual studio as administrator. HTH.

user8128167
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    This was the case for me too. Did you ever figure out why this is? – Sinaesthetic Aug 30 '14 at 04:02
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    This seems to work, but not a real fix, since there is (should) be no need to run Visual Studio as administrator. This is simply an indication the problem might have got something to do with access rights. – Steven Jeuris Dec 21 '14 at 21:14
  • More info [seems to be available on Microsoft connect](https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/807771/visual-studio-2013-test-explorer-only-works-if-run-as-administrator). It might be related to named pipes from 3rd party software which conflicts with Visual Studio. – Steven Jeuris Dec 21 '14 at 21:37
  • Running Visual Studio as administrator worked for me!! Thanks – krilovich Mar 18 '15 at 21:10
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    Worked for me. You made my day ^^ – Jan Rothkegel Jun 30 '16 at 06:25
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This may happen when it takes too long to download debug symbol information from various symbol servers, possibly causing a timeout.

We solved this by going to the menu Debug->Options->Symbols and selecting "Only specified modules". It also makes debugging startup considerably faster.

Gonen I
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    Did not work for me. I guess it is like the fix with the Administrator rights: in your case one of the loaded but not needed modules seemed do cause the problem. But it is not the reason why any model has issues getting loaded. – ecth Apr 26 '17 at 07:08
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It looks like this happens sometimes when the VS execution engine process is terminated. This was the case for me, since I had terminated the process manually when the process was not responding. You could check if you have "vstest.executionengine.exe" process running when you see this error message. I came across this solution at the MS forum below:

Reference: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/997291d8-03e4-47ed-a30d-9d47550c0094/cannot-connect-to-the-testexecutor-via-named-pipes-from-vs-2012-rc

Spry
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  • This worked great. This was caused by an app I built that listens to all named pipe like that: "net.pipe://localhost/" – Carol Nov 21 '16 at 15:42
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I just removed all the content of the test project output folder (objd\amd64 in my case) and error has gone.

user3599725
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I'm using Windows 8.1 and VS2013 and had the same issue.

The reason this was happening to me is the following - I had my android phone connected to my computer and USB debugging was enabled on the phone.

  • I disconnected my phone and test debugging started working.
  • I turned off USB debugging on the phone and connected it again. Test debugging worked again.

There you have it.

Ivan
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As Steven Jeuris mentioned in a comment, this could be related to access rights. In my instance it was caused by launching visual studio from a different active directory domain (runas /netonly /user:...).

BurnsBA
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  • Oh my life! Did you find away around this? I need to use `runas` so I can `run as an administrator` but without using a local administator account (for security reasons). Can't debug without administrator rights if using IIS though. – ᴍᴀᴛᴛ ʙᴀᴋᴇʀ Aug 11 '17 at 12:51