The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log or use the command-line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail.

So I thought of work around this issue. To reproduce the issue, I tampered the exe.config file of one of my application, by removing <configuration> tag from the file. And it started throwing the exception.

The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log or use the command-line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail.

I verified the same with EventViewer, and I found a message like this, under Windows Logs > Application

Activation context generation failed for “C:\CaptureItPlus\Binaries\CaptureItPlus.exe”. Error in manifest or policy file “C:\CaptureItPlus\Binaries\CaptureItPlus.exe.Config” on line 1. Invalid Xml syntax.

The error message is pretty self explanatory. If you are not able to access the event viewer, the other option is using sxstrace.exe tool. You can enable run the sxstrace in trace mode, you can do this by following command.

sxstrace.exe Trace -logfile:C:\captureittrace.log

And execute the application. After getting exception, stop the tracing and you can parse the log file using following command.

sxstrace.exe Parse -logfile:C:\captureittrace.log -outfile:C:\captureittrace.txt

It is required because .log is a binary file. Now open the .txt file, you can see similar message,

INFO: Parsing Application Config File C:\CaptureItPlus\Binaries\CaptureItPlus.exe.Config.
ERROR: Line 1: XML Syntax error.
ERROR: Activation Context generation failed.
End Activation Context Generation.

Now open the .exe.config and add the missing , now double click on the application, this issue will be resolved.

namespace SampleAddIn
{
    using NUnit.Core.Extensibility;

    [NUnitAddin(Name = "SampleAddIn", Description = "This is a Sample AddIn")]
    public class SampleNUnitAddin : IAddin
    {
        #region IAddin Members

        public bool Install(IExtensionHost host)
        {
            return true;
        }

        #endregion
    }
}

You can install the Addin, by copying the assembly to bin\Addins folder, relative to NUnit installation directory. You can verify your addin by starting NUnit, Tools > Addins menu.

Registered AddIns Dialog

This Addin does nothing. It simply registers itself to NUnit. You can more details about NUnit Addins here
If you are using VS2010, then please make sure your target framework is .Net 2.0. Otherwise Addin won’t work.

var metadataBehavior = serviceHost.Description.Behaviors.Find<ServiceMetadataBehavior>()
    ?? new ServiceMetadataBehavior();
serviceHost.Description.Behaviors.Add(metadataBehavior);
serviceHost.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(IMetadataExchange),
    MetadataExchangeBindings.CreateMexHttpBinding(),
    "http://localhost:8080/IService/Mex");

It should be noted that you are not required to enable HttpGet. SvcUtil will still be able to access the MEX without it. However, it is useful if you want to view the WSDL from a browser by going to the address of the service. You cannot do so without enabling the HttpGet.

You can enable parallel test execution by editing the testsettings file, instead of double click and open the test settings dialog, open the file using Open with option in the context menu, and select XML(Text) Editor option, which open the testsettings file in XML Editor. In the XML, find the Execution element. Add parallelTestCount attribute to the Execution element(By default it will not be there).

Parallel Test count attribute in testsettings file

By default it will be 1(if the attribute is not exists), other options are 0 for Auto configure we will use as many tests as we can based on your CPU and core count, and n, the number n of tests to run in parallel. Save the changes. Restart visual studio. And you are done.(Note: You need to restart visual studio, otherwise changes will not reflect.)

Here is a sample unit test

[TestMethod]
public void TestMethod3()
{
    Console.WriteLine(Thread.CurrentThread.Name);
    Thread.Sleep(2000);
}

Now I am running few test cases (11) with no parallelTestCount attribute and here is the Test Results window and summary

Test Results View - No attribute specified

Test Results summary - No attribute specified

Now I added the parallelTestCount attribute, with value of 5 and here is the Test Results window and summary, you can notice the time difference between two executions.

Test Results View - parallelTestCount Attribute specified

Test Results Summary - With parallelTestCount attribute specified

Of course there are many other factors that affect this. There is the cost of starting and tearing down the run, so you will see a lesser effect if you have a few tests. It also depends on the number of CPU/cores you have and of course how fast your tests execute.

Happy unit testing

As earlier you need to add reference of following assemblies

1. Microsoft.TeamFoundation.dll
2. Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.dll
3. Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.dll

which will be available under – C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v2.0\ location.

And here is the code snippet

var tfsName = "http://dotnetthoughts:8080/tfs/defaultcollection";
var tfs = new TeamFoundationServer(tfsName, new UICredentialsProvider());
tfs.EnsureAuthenticated();
if (tfs.HasAuthenticated)
{
	var buildServer = tfs.GetService(typeof(IBuildServer)) as IBuildServer;
	var buildDefinition = buildServer.GetBuildDefinition("", "");
	buildServer.QueueBuild(buildDefinition);
}
catch (Exception exception)
{
    MessageBox.Show(exception.Message);
    throw;
}

Here is how it works, we are connecting and getting the TFS Server, then getting the Build Server using GetService method. And to get the build definition instead of the earlier post(to get all the Build definitions, we are passing “*”), we need to specify the Team project and Build name(Build definitions are unique per team project in TFS). Then we can call QueueBuild() method on Build server object, with build definition as the parameter, which will queue the build definition default values.

Happy coding