"Could not load file or assembly" when building using team city

Question

I'm running into an issue with unit tests on our Team City (8.0.4) build server - the code builds & runs all tests locally via Resharper and nCrunch.

But when running on the server I get the following error, even though the Unity assembly exists in the same directory as the unit test assembly, and is referenced in the unit test assembly.

SetUp method failed. SetUp : System.IO.FileNotFoundException : Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Practices.Unity, Version=2.0.414.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. at XXXX.Unity.UnityContainerAdapter..ctor() at XXXX.GraphExtensionsTests..ctor() in c:\TeamCityV7\Agent-1\work\f02f7e27c0bedfa2\XXXX\Graph.Tests\Extensions\GraphExtensionsTests.cs:line 44

I've confirmed the copy of Microsoft.Practices.Unity is the correct version.

I've also confirmed the assemblies are built using the full version of the framework - not using client profile.

Any ideas why Team City might be failing?

Are you using the NuGet package for Unity? If not I would recommend that you do as I've found that a lot of these reference issues become much more straigtforward when using NuGet. — Paul Hunt, Jan 16 '14 at 15:16
If you want some insight as to where it's looking for the 'missing' assembly, you can use a windows utility called fuslogvw, [described here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17681432/how-can-i-enable-assembly-binding-logging/17682082#17682082). — Scampbell, Jan 16 '14 at 16:34

Andy · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-10T19:07:00.567

17

Check the pattern you're using to locate your test assemblies. I had a similar problem with another library and it turns out the pattern was finding the test assembly under bin\Release and obj\Release; the obj folder doesn't contain all the assemblies referenced by the project and is really just a scratch folder for the compiler.

edited Jul 10 '14 at 19:07

answered Jan 16 '14 at 18:12

Andy

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Bingo! There was a rogue test assembly referenced by another test assembly and it was running the rogue assembly tests as well. – AwkwardCoder Jan 17 '14 at 13:52
Nice one, that did the job! :) – Greg Oks Nov 15 '15 at 10:16
1

I was able to resolve this issue by changing my **Test file names** pattern from `**\*.Tests.dll` to `**\bin\**\*.Tests.dll` – Dan Sinclair Jan 31 '19 at 21:16

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 06 '14 at 18:43

Another possibility I recently discovered is if you are using a library that you are not explicitly referencing, TeamCity will not collect the library for use and fail when it is implicitly referencing the assembly. I discovered this when trying to figure out why NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle, which was referenced in my test project, was not being loaded and resulting in a FileNotFoundException on TeamCity. Ultimately, I made a "dummy" unit test like so:

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;
using NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle;

namespace MyNamespace
{
    [TestClass]
    public class CastleProxyPresenceTest
    {

        [TestMethod]
        [TestCategory("Infrastructure: This test forces TeamCity to load the NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle.dll file.")]
        public void CastleProxyLoads()
        {
            var dummy = new LazyFieldInterceptor();
            Assert.IsNotNull(dummy);
        }
    }
}

...after this, the file loaded properly and my unit tests compiled.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 28 '20 at 23:14

First step is to nuke your local copy of the repository and clone it anew. If you're deploying a branch, switch to that branch before you restore packages and build for the first time. You will get a better clue about the real reason for the problem.

One possibility not listed here is if your test project is a Framework project, but there is a .NET Standard project in the same solution, the test project may not be able to find the package references for the Standard project on a clean clone / restore / build.

"Could not load file or assembly" when building using team city

3 Answers3

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