An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest was not found

[eduherminio]

When upgrading NUnit3TestAdapter package to 3.16.1 via Visual Studio in a .NET Core 3.1 project, it automatically adds PrivateAssets and IncludeAssets like this:

    <PackageReference Include="NUnit3TestAdapter" Version="3.16.1">
      <PrivateAssets>all</PrivateAssets>
      <IncludeAssets>runtime; build; native; contentfiles; analyzers; buildtransitive</IncludeAssets>
    </PackageReference>

That makes some tests invoked by dotnet vstest fail when run inside of a docker container based on mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/sdk:3.1.201-bionic.

We've suffered 2 different errors so far, one of them being:

Testhost process exited with error: Error:
      An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest (XXXXXXX.deps.json) was not found:
        package: 'Microsoft.Win32.Registry', version: '4.3.0'
        path: 'runtimes/unix/lib/netstandard1.3/Microsoft.Win32.Registry.dll'

The other one, whose logs I don't longer have access to, was also indicating some issue with a dll inside of lib/netstandardXX.

We are unable to reproduce this either via VisualStudio or with dotnet vstest, just inside of a docker container based on the sdk image.

Removing PrivateAssets and IncludeAssets was the solution to workaround this issue.

[OsirisTerje]

@jnm2 Can you comment on this, please?

[jnm2]

PrivateAssets and IncludeAssets are added if you use the .NET SDK to reference a NuGet package that has developmentDependency="true" in its .nuspec file.

A development dependency is one that is not used at runtime, only at build time. I suspect that it doesn't make sense for us to be marking the adapter package as such. Do you know of any reason in favor of keeping developmentDependency="true"?

[OsirisTerje]

Thanks @jnm2 !!
Actually not....... I think that was added way back in time, since the adapter is only used during development, but then again, it is only added to the test projects, so it sort of has no additional meaning then. So we can then just set that to false.

[OsirisTerje]

@eduherminio Beta released on Nuget, see https://www.nuget.org/packages/NUnit3TestAdapter/3.17.0-beta.1 . Please check that it works :-)

[eduherminio]

Looks good to me, thanks @OsirisTerje!