In Visual Studio 2010, I have a number of unit tests. When I run multiple tests at one time using test lists, I sometimes reveive the following error for one or more of the tests:
The agent process was stopped while
the test was running.
It is never the same test failing, and if I try to run the test again, it succeeds.
I found this bug report on Connect, which seems to be the same problem, but it does not offer a solution.
Has anyone else seen this behaviour ? How I can avoid it ?
Edit
I am still experiencing this bug, and so is many of my colleagues on the same software/hardware setup. I have evaluated the answers so far, but they don't resolve the problem. I am starting a bounty for a solution to this problem.
This message is caused by an exception on a thread different from the executing test thread. All answers so far boil down to this simple explanation. It is a known bug in Visual Studio not to display any sensible information in that case.
Visual Studio’s test runner totally chokes if a thread other than the executing test thread throws an exception: It gets swallowed and there’s no output, no chance to intercept and debug and no nothing except a burned-down smoldering mess that was supposed to be your unit test.
I've just experienced the similar problem: some tests fail and they are different in different test runs. I don't know exactly the reason why it happens, but it began to occur when I added a finalizer to one of my classes. When I disable the finalizer - the problem disappears. When I turn the finalizer on - the problem comes back.
Right now I don't know how to overcome this.
I was having this problem, and it turned out to be a problem in my code which the Test Framework wasn't catching properly. A little accidental refactoring had left me with this code:
public void GetThingy()
{
this.GetThingy();
}
This is of course an infinite recursion, and caused a StackOverflowException (I guess). What this caused was the dreaded: "The agent process was stopped while the test was running."
A quick code inspection showed me the problem, and my tests are now running fine. Hope this helps - might be worth inspecting the code looking for issues, or maybe extracting a bit into a console app and checking it works properly there.
I was able to find the source of my problem by looking in the test result file (/TestResults/*.trx) It provided the full details of the exception that occurred in the background thread, and once I resolved that exception the "agent processed stopped..." error went away.
In my case I was unintentionally launching the GUI in my unit test, which eventually caused a System.ComponentModel.InvalidAsynchronousStateException to be thrown.
So my .trx file contained:
<RunInfo computerName="DT-1202" outcome="Error" timestamp="2013-07-29T13:52:11.2647907-04:00">
<Text>One of the background threads threw exception:
System.ComponentModel.InvalidAsynchronousStateException: An error occurred invoking the method. The destination thread no longer exists.
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WaitForWaitHandle(WaitHandle waitHandle)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.MarshaledInvoke(Control caller, Delegate method, Object[] args, Boolean synchronous)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.Invoke(Delegate method, Object[] args)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.Invoke(Delegate method)
...
</Text>
</RunInfo>
This didn't provide any information on what test caused the error, but it did show me where the exception was, which was very useful.
This message is typically generated when the test process crashes and can happen when there is an unhandled exception on a background thread, a stack overflow occurs, or an explicit call to Process.GetCurrentProcess().Kill() or Environment.Exit. Another possible cause is an access violation in unmanaged code.
Something no one has mentioned is that there may be additional information in the event log. Usually you will not get much information on why the test crashed in the results, however in the event of an unhandled exception on a background thread, then the test framework writes details to the Application event log with source VSTTExecution. If there is no information written to the event log then it is likely one of the other causes listed above.
I encountered the same Problem and solved it while Removing
Environment.Exit(0);
So i am pretty sure, that this error occurs while your test or method under test, is causing the executing process to terminate.
In my case the solution was resolved by checking the Output Window.
'QTAgent32.exe' (Managed
(v4.0.30319)): Loaded
'C:\TestResults\bdewey_XXXXXX072
2011-01-11
17_00_40\Out\MyCode.dll',
Symbols loaded. E, 9024, 9,
2011/01/11, 17:00:46.827,
XXXXX072\QTAgent32.exe, Unhandled
Exception Caught, reporting through
Watson: [Exception message]
In my case I had a FileSystemWatcher that was throwing an error on a seperate thread.
Thanks for posting the question. I just ran into this problem and figured out a cause that you may be running into.
An asynchronous exception may have
occurred
During my test setup, I create an object that queues a worker thread in the thread pool. If I run through debugging fast enough my code passes.
If the worker thread kicks off and has an error BEFORE the test setup completes, then I get a result of Aborted with no reasoning.
If the worker thread kicks off and has an error AFTER the test has begun, then I get a result of : Error - The agent process was stopped while the test was running.
Important to note: this is a component that I use throughout several of my tests. If the test framework encounters too many of these errors it aborts the rest of the tests.
Hope this helps
I added try/catch blocks to the descructor ~ClassName(){} that were defined in any class involved in my tests. This fixed the problem for me.
~MyClass()
{
try
{
// Some Code
}
catch (Exception e)
{
// Log the exception so it's not totally hidden
// Console.WriteLine(e.ToString());
}
}
For finding out where the exception was thrown click on the hyperlink "Test Run Error" next to the exclamation icon in the Test Results window. A window with the stack trace is opened.
This helps a lot to track down the error!
I had the same problem and it was caused by a finalizer for an unmanaged resource (a file writer that was not getting disposed properly for some reason).
After wrapping the finalizer code in a try-catch that swallows the exception, the problem disappeared. I don't recommend swallowing exceptions like that, so it would obviously be wise to find out why the exception is occurring in the first place.
I have had this happening on the odd occasion, and the culprit almost always turns out to be threading.
Strangely enough all the tests would work fine on the development machines, then randomly fail on the build servers.
On closer inspection it turned out that although the tests were being listed as passed on the dev boxes, there were exceptions being thrown. The exceptions were being thrown on a seperate thread which didn't get picked up as an error.
The exception details were being logged against the test trace, so we were able to identify which code/tests needed to be modified.
Hope this helps someone.
In my case I had some unit-tests for a WCF-service. This WCF service was starting up 2 timers.
Those timers caused side effects.
--> I disable these timers by default and everything is fine!
BTW: I use WCFMock to fake the WCF service, so I have "real" unit tests around my WCF service
This error was caused by a Finalizer for me as well.
The Finalizer was actaully calling some DB code which wasn't mocked out. Took me a while to find it as it wasn't a class I wrote and the reference to it was burred quite a few classes deep.
I have run into a similar problem where a test is failing in TestInitialize and is also running code from a ddl from another of my projects. I get the error message as described above and if I try to debug the test, the test is just aborted without any exception details.
I suspect that the problem may be that the dlls from my other project are from a Visual Studio 2012 project and I am running my tests in a VS2010 project, and/or possibly that the UnitTestFramwork dll versions from the 2 projects are mismatched.
The problem can also be triggered by an Exception or Stackoverflow in Constructor of a TestClass.
As this error can have many different causes, I'd like to add another one for completeness of this thread.
If all your tests are aborting as described by the OP, the cause might be a wrong project configuration. In my case the target framework was set to .NET Framework 3.5. Setting it to a higher version through the project properties page (tab Application) resolved the issue.
I was able to determine what was causing my issue by looking in the Windows Logs > Application log entries within the Windows Event Viewer. Look for entries at the time the test bombed-out. I had an Error entry similar to below:
QTAgent32_40.exe, PID 10432, Thread 2) AgentProcess:CurrentDomain_UnhandledException: IsTerminating : System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
at XXX.YYY.ZZZ.cs:line 660
at XXX.YYY.AAA.Finalize() in C:\JenkinsSlave\workspace\XXX.YYY.AAA.cs:line 180
It was indeed a null reference exception within a method called from a class finalizer.
For anyone happening upon this old question and wondering what's being thrown from their thread(s), here's a tip. Using Task.Run (as opposed to, say, Thread.Start) will report child thread exceptions much more reliably. In short, instead of this:
Thread t = new Thread(FunctionThatThrows);
t.Start();
t.Join();
Do this:
Task t = Task.Run(() => FunctionThatThrows());
t.Wait();
And your error logs should be much more useful.
I have recently inherited a couple of applications that run as windows services, and I am having problems providing a gui (accessible from a context menu in system tray) with both of them.
The reason why we need a gui for a windows service is in order to be able to re-configure the behaviour of the windows service(s) without resorting to stopping/re-starting.
My code works fine in debug mode, and I get the context menu come up, and everything behaves correctly etc.
When I install the service via "installutil" using a named account (i.e., not Local System Account), the service runs fine, but doesn't display the icon in the system tray (I know this is normal behavior because I don't have the "interact with desktop" option).
Here is the problem though - when I choose the "LocalSystemAccount" option, and check the "interact with desktop" option, the service takes AGES to start up for no obvious reason, and I just keep getting
Could not start the ... service on Local Computer.
Error 1053: the service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.
Incidentally, I increased the windows service timeout from the default 30 seconds to 2 minutes via a registry hack (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/824344, search for TimeoutPeriod in section 3), however the service start up still times out.
My first question is - why might the "Local System Account" login takes SOOOOO MUCH LONGER than when the service logs in with the non-LocalSystemAccount, causing the windows service time-out? what's could the difference be between these two to cause such different behavior at start up?
Secondly - taking a step back, all I'm trying to achieve, is simply a windows service that provides a gui for configuration - I'd be quite happy to run using the non-Local System Account (with named user/pwd), if I could get the service to interact with the desktop (that is, have a context menu available from the system tray). Is this possible, and if so how?
Any pointers to the above questions would be appreciated!
After fighting this message for days, a friend told me that you MUST use the Release build. When I InstallUtil the Debug build, it gives this message. The Release build Starts fine.
If you continue down the road of trying to make your service interact with the user's desktop directly, you'll lose: even under the best of circumstances (i.e. "before Vista"), this is extremely tricky.
Windows internally manages several window stations, each with their own desktop. The window station assigned to services running under a given account is completely different from the window station of the logged-on interactive user. Cross-window station access has always been frowned upon, as it's a security risk, but whereas previous Windows versions allowed some exceptions, these have been mostly eliminated in Vista and later operating systems.
The most likely reason your service is hanging on startup, is because it's trying to interact with a nonexistent desktop (or assumes Explorer is running inside the system user session, which also isn't the case), or waiting for input from an invisible desktop.
The only reliable fix for these issues is to eliminate all UI code from your service, and move it to a separate executable that runs inside the interactive user session (the executable can be started using the global Startup group, for example).
Communication between your UI code and your service can be implemented using any RPC mechanism: Named Pipes work particularly well for this purpose. If your communications needs are minimal, using application-defined Service Control Manager commands might also do the trick.
It will take some effort to achieve this separation between UI and service code: however, it's the only way to make things work reliably, and will serve you well in the future.
ADDENDUM, April 2010: Since this question remains pretty popular, here's a way to fix another common scenario that causes "service did not respond..." errors, involving .NET services that don't attempt any funny stuff like interacting with the desktop, but do use Authenticode signed assemblies: disable the verification of the Authenticode signature at load time in order to create Publisher evidence, by adding the following elements to your .exe.config file:
<configuration>
<runtime>
<generatePublisherEvidence enabled="false"/>
</runtime>
</configuration>
Publisher evidence is a little-used Code Access Security (CAS) feature: only in the unlikely event that your service actually relies on the PublisherMembershipCondition will disabling it cause issues. In all other cases, it will make the permanent or intermittent startup failures go away, by no longer requiring the runtime to do expensive certificate checks (including revocation list lookups).
I faced this problem because of a missing framework on the box running my service. The box had .NET 4.0 and the service was written on top of .NET 4.5.
I installed the following download on the box, restarted, and the service started up fine:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30653
To debug the startup of your service, add the following to the top of the OnStart() method of your service:
while(!System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached) Thread.Sleep(100);
This will stall the service until you manually attach the Visual Studio Debugger using Debug -> Attach to Process...
Note: In general, if you need a user to interact with your service, it is better to split the GUI components into a separate Windows application that runs when the user logs in. You then use something like named pipes or some other form of IPC to establish communication between the GUI app and your service. This is in fact the only way that this is possible in Windows Vista.
In service class within OnStart method don't do huge operation, OS expect short amount of time to run service, run your method using thread start:
protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
{
Thread t = new Thead(new ThreadStart(MethodName)); // e.g.
t.Start();
}
I'm shooting blind here, but I've very often found that long delays in service startups are directly or indirectly caused by network function timeouts, often when attemting to contact a domain controller when looking up account SIDs - which happens very often indirectly via GetMachineAccountSid() whether you realize it or not, since that function is called by the RPC subsystem.
For an example on how to debug in such situations, see The Case of the Process Startup Delays on Mark Russinovich's blog.
If you are using Debug code as below in your service the problem may arise.
#if(!DEBUG)
ServiceBase[] ServicesToRun;
ServicesToRun = new ServiceBase[]
{
new EmailService()
};
ServiceBase.Run(ServicesToRun);
#else
//direct call function what you need to run
#endif
To fix this, while you build your windows service remove #if condition because it didn't work as it is.
Please use argument for debug mode instead as below.
if (args != null && args.Length > 0)
{
_isDebug = args[0].ToLower().Contains("debug");
}
In my case the problem was missing version of .net framework.
My service used
<startup>
<supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.5" />
</startup>
But .net Framework version of server was 4, so by changing 4.5 to 4 the problem fixed:
<startup>
<supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0" />
</startup>
Copy the release DLL or get the dll from release mode rather than Debug mode and paste it to installation folder,,it should work
I was running into a similar problem with a Service I was writing. It worked fine then one day I started getting the timeout on Start errors. It happened in one &/or both Release and Debug depending on what was going on. I had instantiated an EventLogger from System.Diagnostics, but whatever error I was seeing must have been happening before the Logger was able to write...
If you are not aware of where to look up the EventLogs, in VS you can go to your machine under the Server Explorer. I started poking around in some of the other EventLogs besides those for my Service. Under Application - .NETRuntime I found the Error logs pertinent to the error on startup. Basically, there were some exceptions in my service's constructor (one turned out to be an exception in the EventLog instance setup - which explained why I could not see any logs in my Service EventLog). On a previous build apparently there had been other errors (which had caused me to make the changes leading to the error in the EventLog set up).
Long story short - the reason for the timeout may be due to various exceptions/errors, but using the Runtime EventLogs may just help you figure out what is going on (especially in the instances where one build works but another doesn't).
Hope this helps!
Install the debug build of the service and attach the debugger to the service to see what's happening.
I want to echo mdb's comments here. Don't go this path. Your service is not supposed to have a UI... "No user interaction" is like the definining feature of a service.
If you need to configure your service, write another application that edits the same configuration that the service reads on startup. But make it a distinct tool -- when you want to start the service, you start the service. When you want to configure it, you run the configuration tool.
Now, if you need realtime monitoring of the service, then that's a little trickier (and certainly something I've wished for with services). Now you're talking about having to use interprocess communications and other headaches.
Worst of all, if you need user interaction, then you have a real disconnect here, because services don't interact with the user.
In your shoes I would step back and ask why does this need to be a service? And why does it need user interaction?
These two requirements are pretty incompatible, and that should raise alarms.
I had this problem and it drove me nuts for two days…
If your problem similar to mine:
I have settings “User settings” in my windows service, so the service can do self-maintenance, without stopping and starting the service. Well, the problem is with the “user settings”, where the config file for these settings is saved in a folder under the user-profile of the user who is running the windows service under the service-exe file version.
This folder for some reason was corrupted. I deleted the folder and service start working back again happily as usual…
I had this problem, it took about a day to fix. For me the problem was that my code skipped the "main content" and effectively ran a couple of lines then finished. And this caused the error for me. It is a C# console application which installs a Windows Service, as soon as it tried to run it with the ServiceController (sc.Run() ) then it would give this error for me.
After I fixed the code to go to the main content, it would run the intended code:
ServiceBase.Run(new ServiceHost());
Then it stopped showing up.
As lots of people have already said, the error could be anything, and the solutions people provide may or may not solve it. If they don't solve it (like the Release instead of Debug, adding generatePublisherEvidence=false into your config, etc), then chances are that the problem is with your own code.
Try and get your code to run without using sc.Run() (i.e. make the code run that sc.Run() would have executed).
This problem usually occurs when there is some reference missing on your assembly and usually the binding fails at the run time.
to debug put Thread.Sleep(1000) in the main(). and put a break point in the next line of execution.
Then start the process and attach the debugger to the process while it is starting. Press f5 after it hit the break point. It will throw the exception of missing assembly or reference.
Hopefully this will resolve this error.
Once try to run your exe file. I had the same problem, but when I ran it direct by double click on the exe file, I got a message about .Net framework version, because I was released the service project with a framework which it wasn't installed on target machine.
Took me hours, should have seen the event viewer get_AppSettings().
A change in the app config, caused the problem.
Adding 127.0.0.1 crl.microsoft.com to the "Hosts" file solved our issue.
My issue was due to target framework mentioned in windows service config was
<startup>
<supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.6"/>
</startup>
and my server in which I tried to install windows service was not supported for this .Net version.
Changing which , I could able to resolve the issue.
I had a similar issue, steps I followed:
Put a Debugger.Launch() in the windows service constructor
Followed step by step to see where it got stuck
My issue wasn't due to any error.
I had a BlockingCollection.GetConsumingEnumerable() in the way that caused the windows service to wait.
I had this problem too. I made it to work by changing Log On account to Local System Account. In my project I had it setup to run as Local Service account. So when I installed it, by default it was using Local Service. I'm using .net 2.0 and VS 2005. So installing .net 1.1 SP1 wouldn't have helped.
Both Local System Account and Local Service would not work for me, i then set it to Network Service and this worked fine.
In my case, I had this trouble due to a genuine error. Before the service constructor is called, one static constructor of member variable was failing:
private static OracleCommand cmd;
static SchedTasks()
{
try
{
cmd = new OracleCommand("select * from change_notification");
}
catch (Exception e)
{
Log(e.Message);
// "The provider is not compatible with the version of Oracle client"
}
}
By adding try-catch block I found the exception was occuring because of wrong oracle version. Installing correct database solved the problem.
I also faced similar problem and found that there was issue loading assembly. I was receiving this error immediately when trying to start the service.
To quickly debug the issue, try to run service executable via command prompt using ProcDump http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/dd996900. It shall provide sufficient hint about exact error.
http://bytes.com/topic/net/answers/637227-1053-error-trying-start-my-net-windows-service helped me quite a bit.
This worked for me. Basically make sure the Log on user is set to the right one. However it depends how the account infrastructure is set. In my example it's using AD account user credentials.
In start up menu search box search for 'Services'
-In Services find the required service
-right click on and select the Log On tab
-Select 'This account' and enter the required content/credentials
-Ok it and start the service as usual
In case you have a windows form used for testing, ensure that the startup object is still the service and not the windows form
We have Log4Net configured to log to a database table. The table had grown so large that the service was timing out trying to log messages.
open the services window as administrator,Then try to start the service.That worked for me.
Build project in Release Mode.
Copy all Release folder files to source path.
Execute Window service using command prompt window in administrative access.
Never delete files from source path.
At lease this works for me.
Release build did not work for me, however, I looked through my event viewer and Application log and saw that the Windows Service was throwing a security exception when it was trying to create an event log. I fixed this by adding the event source manually with administration access.
I followed this guide from Microsoft:
open registry editor, run --> regedit
Locate the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Eventlog\Application
Right-click the Application subkey, point to New, and then click Key.
Type event source name used in your windows service for the key name.
Close Registry Editor.
We are running our Junit 4 test suite against Weblogic 9 in front of an Oracle 10 database (using Hudson as a continuous integration server) and occasionally we will get an ORA-12519 crash during script teardown. However, the error is very intermittent:
It usually happens for the same Test class
It doesn't always happen for the same test cases (sometimes they pass)
It doesn't happen for the same number of test cases (anywhere from 3-9)
Sometimes it doesn't happen at all, everything passes
While I can't guarantee this doesn't happen locally (when running against the same database, of course), I have run the same suite of class multiple times with no issues.
Any ideas?
Don't know if this will be everybody's answer, but after some digging, here's what we came up with.
The error is obviously caused by the fact that the listener was not accepting connections, but why would we get that error when other tests could connect fine (we could also connect no problem through sqlplus)? The key to the issue wasn't that we couldn't connect, but that it was intermittent
After some investigation, we found that there was some static data created during the class setup that would keep open connections for the life of the test class, creating new ones as it went. Now, even though all of the resources were properly released when this class went out of scope (via a finally{} block, of course), there were some cases during the run when this class would swallow up all available connections (okay, bad practice alert - this was unit test code that connected directly rather than using a pool, so the same problem could not happen in production).
The fix was to not make that class static and run in the class setup, but instead use it in the per method setUp and tearDown methods.
So if you get this error in your own apps, slap a profiler on that bad boy and see if you might have a connection leak. Hope that helps.
Another solution I have found to a similar error but the same error message is to increase the number of service handlers found. (My instance of this error was caused by too many connections in the Weblogic Portal Connection pools.)
Run SQL*Plus and login as SYSTEM. You should know what password you’ve used during the installation of Oracle DB XE.
Run the command alter system set processes=150 scope=spfile; in SQL*Plus OR any SQL friendly IDE.
VERY IMPORTANT: Restart the database, to make the change effective in the SPFILE.
From here:
http://www.atpeaz.com/index.php/2010/fixing-the-ora-12519-tnsno-appropriate-service-handler-found-error/
I also had the same problem, I searched for the answers many places. I got many similar answers to change the number of process/service handlers. But I thought, what if I forgot to reset it back?
Then I tried using Thread.sleep() method after each of my connection.close();.
I don't know how, but it's working at least for me.
If any one wants to try it out and figure out how it's working then please go ahead. I would also like to know it as I am a beginner in programming world.
I had this problem in a unit test which opened a lot of connections to the DB via a connection pool and then "stopped" the connection pool (ManagedDataSource actually) to release the connections at the end of the each test. I always ran out of connections at some point in the suite of tests.
Added a Thread.sleep(500) in the teardown() of my tests and this resolved the issue. I think that what was happening was that the connection pool stop() releases the active connections in another thread so that if the main thread keeps running tests the cleanup thread(s) got so far behind that the Oracle server ran out of connections. Adding the sleep allows the background threads to release the pooled connections.
This is much less of an issue in the real world because the DB servers are much bigger and there is a healthy mix of operations (not just endless DB connect/disconnect operations).
I had the similar issue. It happened every time when I run a pack of database (Spring JDBC) tests with SpringJUnit4ClassRunner, so I resolved the issue putting #DirtiesContext annotation for each test in order to cleanup the application context and release all resources thus each test could run with a new initalization of the application context.