Xunit Unit Tests will not run

Question

I am completely stuck on this issue. So my team has a unit test project in a services test project. The tests are discovered in the test explorer pane however when I try and

Answer 1

I was having a similar issue as yours, stating could not find dependent assembly; when in fact, that assembly was there and available to the xUnit VS runner. However, what the actual issue was, I had Visual Studio set to use the 32bit test runner by default. The 'dependent assembly' it couldn't find was simply a different processor architecture than the xUnit test runner being used.

To fix, as mentioned here, from the Visual Studio menu, go to Test -> Test Settings -> Default Processor Architecture and set that to X64 if you are using 64bit assemblies, or X86 if you are using 32bit assemblies. The error that the xUnit VS runner gives is very misleading to try to debug this issue.

This issue I saw when installing Visual Studio on a new machine. The tests would run on my desktop maching in Visual Studio, but not on my laptop.