Skip to main content

Azure Pipelines - Unable to determine the location of vstest.console.exe

A colleague forwarded me a question about a failing build pipeline. When I took a look at the build results, I noticed that the Visual Studio Test task was failing.

Inside the logs I found more details explaining what was going on:

##[warning]No results found to publish.

##[debug]Processed: ##vso[task.logissue type=warning]No results found to publish.

##[error]System.Management.Automation.CmdletInvocationException: Unable to determine the location of vstest.console.exe ---> System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Unable to determine the location of vstest.console.exe

##[debug]Processed: ##vso[task.logissue type=error;]System.Management.Automation.CmdletInvocationException: Unable to determine the location of vstest.console.exe ---> System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Unable to determine the location of vstest.console.exe

   at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Internal.InvokeVSTestCmdlet.GetVsTestLocation()

   at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Internal.InvokeVSTestCmdlet.ProcessRecord()

   at System.Management.Automation.CommandProcessor.ProcessRecord()

   --- End of inner exception stack trace ---

   at System.Management.Automation.Runspaces.PipelineBase.Invoke(IEnumerable input)

   at System.Management.Automation.PowerShell.Worker.ConstructPipelineAndDoWork(Runspace rs, Boolean performSyncInvoke)

   at System.Management.Automation.PowerShell.Worker.CreateRunspaceIfNeededAndDoWork(Runspace rsToUse, Boolean isSync)

   at System.Management.Automation.PowerShell.CoreInvokeHelper[TInput,TOutput](PSDataCollection`1 input, PSDataCollection`1 output, PSInvocationSettings settings)

   at System.Management.Automation.PowerShell.CoreInvoke[TInput,TOutput](PSDataCollection`1 input, PSDataCollection`1 output, PSInvocationSettings settings)

   at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Handlers.LegacyVSTSPowerShellHost.VSTSPowerShellHost.Main(String[] args)

##[error]LegacyVSTSPowerShellHost.exe completed with return code: -1.

On the build server only the latest Visual Studio 2019 Build tools were installed. I noticed that he was still using an older Visual Studio Test Task version. This older version could only handle older Visual Studio version.

I changed it to the latest version:

Now I could select Visual Studio 2019(or latest)  as the Test platform version:

I triggered the build again and this time it succeeded.

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...

VS Code Planning mode

After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio , it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan. If you want more details, have a look at my previous post . Putting plan mode into action VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent: I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated. Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions: You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’: ...