Visual Studio test, Process.Start, SQLCMD and Windows Command Processor error

Question

I'm working with Visual Studio 2012 and I'm developing some integration tests using Visual Studio's test framework (mstest).

Some days ago I found some info regarding that now Visual Studio 2012 can execute tests in the output directory (i.e. bin\Debug, bin\Release) and I disabled deployment in order to simplify a lot of things.

Although most of the things worked as expected, I found a big problem: some [ClassInitialize] code executes a process using Process class and, just after disabling deployment, whenever a process is launched, I get this error:

My first impression was that maybe something in the process launching was incorrect and I copy-pasted the same command and arguments into a CMD and it worked as expected.

After some investigation, I figured out why happened this: because I configured test runner to be launched as a 64bit process. After switching to X86, for example Process.Start("cmd") worked.

But what's worse is SQLCMD - the actual process that I'm launching within test run - still fails with the so-called error.

This error happens when any process is launched within Visual Studio test runner.

What happens with SQLCMD when launched from a test runner?

Answer 1

After a lot of trials and errors finally I've solved the problem.

• Now I can run tests as a 64bit process (I thought this was the main problem but I was mistaken!).
• I can still run tests from the output directory!

But what I had to change to get it work properly? The .runsettings file. It was just commenting out <DataCollectionRunSettings> XML element... And suddenly SQLCMD process started to work again!

I really don't know why commenting out that configuration element did the trick, but the point is that, as I only want integration tests and run them "as is", this solution is fine for me.

Anyway, if anyone can explain why commenting out <DataCollectionRunSettings> elements makes this effect, it'll be appreciated.

Thank you anyway!