MS Test missing after update

We updated from 1.8.0.x to 1.8.1.256.

After that our builds hang up at testing stage because of:

The expression [’$Agent.MSTest.VisualStudio.2013.Path$’ exists] evaluated False. ‘$Agent.MSTest.VisualStudio.2013.Path$’ does not exist.
The same for MSTest Studio 2010.

This is shown by the agent compat matrix. for sure, everything is installed.

Well, even after adding a custom property to the agent, the stages start initializing but stop with the following:

The executable was not found at path “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE”.

Hi Christian,

Thank you for reporting this. It looks like we have introduced a bug reading correct path from the registry when adding MSTest.VisualStudio.2017 support. Is it possible that Visual Studio is installed to a different directory on your agent?

Can you check the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\ in the registry for a InstallDir value? I suspect this is different than C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE and that your mstest.exe is located in a different installation folder.

We’ll try to get a new build out today with a fix for this. Meanwhile, if you can find the location of mstest.exe on your agent, then set your MSTest.VisualStudio.2013.Path custom property to the full path including the filename.



we have changed nothing. server and agent are the same machine. i just updated the version.
All registry keys and paths are correct.

The property itself isn’t shown in the agent properties. so i created a custom property an the agent with the hardcoded path (as shown above).
However, then is fails too with saying: The executable was not found at path “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE”.

Hi Christian,

We don’t think that you have changed anything. We think that your mstest.exe has always been installed to a different folder.

There is a bug. The previous version was reading the path from the registry, but  the later version fails to read the path from the registry and only looks for “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\mstest.exe”.  We will get a fix out for this bug soon, we just need to do some further testing on another fix first. 

This fix will only work of your mstest.exe is installed to another folder (e.g. not C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE) and that folder is in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\InstallDir.

Can you confirm this?



the studio 2013 is intalled in “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0” … so (i’ve checked this right now) mstest.exe is existing in “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\MSTest.exe”.

ANd the INSTALLDIR on in “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0” points to “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE”.

so as i understand your current answer, i cannot confirm this here. maybe its simply the file casing?

OK, this is odd. It’s working for us with mstest.exe in that  path. The file case should not matter at all.

Can you try changing your custom property collection to the full path? e.g.  “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\mstest.exe” rather than “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE”


i’ve changed the path to the full exe, now it works. here is my property defined for the single agent:

http://pasteboard.co/ptj9Tex5Q.png

to verify that, i removed the property from the agent, now i get the results from first post:

http://pasteboard.co/ptsjBqZKK.png

How about if you remove the custom property then click the Refresh button? Are there are errors in the Continua event log?

i already removed the property. refreshing does nothing. no new entries in den event log.
however, i found a message 4 days ago that sounds strange but i don’t know if it has something to do with da.
i also restarted the agent service.

Message:

Agent Controller

Error getting agent properties from a batch of 30 collectors for agent: ‘nemesis’ as a connection could not be established on nemesis:localhost. Make sure the port has been excluded from any firewall enabled on the target machine.

This event has been reported 2 times.

Hi Christian,

We just uploaded version 1.8.1.264 to the downloads page. This includes fixes for the registry reading of the import path. This doesn’t however seem to be the issue in your case so we’ve also added some debug logging to the property collector.

Please install and then try removing your custom property collector. If the issue persists, we would appreciate it if you could enable debug logging on your agent and send us a copy of the agent debug log once it has been running for a few minutes.


My both MSTest properties (vs2010 and vs2013) are back. So your fix also worked for me.