Error debugging code in visual studio 2012 - Failed to initialize client proxy: could not connect to

Question

I am having Issues debugging unit tests in visual studio. I can run them fine from test explorer. The issue is that I cannot step into the code and debug. Also, I am able to debug other parts of the code that are not unit tests.

When I right click on the test from test explorer and click debug I get a loading dialog saying "Loading symbols for vstest.executionengine.x86.exe from f:\biniaries\vset\mstestexecutor.x8g.csproj_1420192002\objr\x86". After a few more of these the test stops running and I get the following error displayed in the output window under "Tests".

  ------ Run test started ------
  Failed to initialize client proxy: could not connect to .
  ========== Run test finished: 0 run (0:01:05.45) ==========

I have tried the following:

• Set new directory for the "Cache symbols in this directory" setting.
• Reinstalled VS2012 with Update 3
• Running with the safemode switch
• Ran the vs2012 repair tool

Answer 1

In my case I found that I needed to run visual studio as administrator. HTH.

Answer 2

This may happen when it takes too long to download debug symbol information from various symbol servers, possibly causing a timeout.

We solved this by going to the menu Debug->Options->Symbols and selecting "Only specified modules". It also makes debugging startup considerably faster.

Answer 3

It looks like this happens sometimes when the VS execution engine process is terminated. This was the case for me, since I had terminated the process manually when the process was not responding. You could check if you have "vstest.executionengine.exe" process running when you see this error message. I came across this solution at the MS forum below:

Reference: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/997291d8-03e4-47ed-a30d-9d47550c0094/cannot-connect-to-the-testexecutor-via-named-pipes-from-vs-2012-rc

Answer 4

I just removed all the content of the test project output folder (objd\amd64 in my case) and error has gone.

Answer 5

I'm using Windows 8.1 and VS2013 and had the same issue.

The reason this was happening to me is the following - I had my android phone connected to my computer and USB debugging was enabled on the phone.

• I disconnected my phone and test debugging started working.
• I turned off USB debugging on the phone and connected it again. Test debugging worked again.

There you have it.

Answer 6

As Steven Jeuris mentioned in a comment, this could be related to access rights. In my instance it was caused by launching visual studio from a different active directory domain (runas /netonly /user:...).