ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM Unit Tests not compiling

I found something weird this time when it came to ASP.NET MVC 2 release. A very handful of people ‘made noise’ about the release.. at least on the asp.net blog site, usually there’s a big ‘WOOHAA… <something> is released’, kind of a thing. Hmm… but here’s the reason I’m writing this post.

I’m not sure how many of you read the release notes before downloading the version.. I did, I did, I did. Now there’s a ‘Known issues’ section in the document and I’m quoting the text as is from this section:

Unit test project does not contain reference to ASP.NET MVC 2 project: If the Solution Explorer window is hidden in Visual Studio, when you create a new ASP.NET MVC 2 Web application project and you select the option Yes, create a unit test project in the Create Unit Test Project dialog box, the unit test project is created but does not have a reference to the associated ASP.NET MVC 2 project. When you build the solution, Visual Studio will display compilation errors and the unit tests will not run.

There are two workarounds. The first workaround is to make sure that the Solution Explorer is displayed when you create a new ASP.NET MVC 2 Web application project. If you prefer to keep Solution Explorer hidden, the second workaround is to manually add a project reference from the unit test project to the ASP.NET MVC 2 project.

This definitely looks like a bug to me and see below for a visual:

At the top right corner you’ll see that the Solution Explorer is set to auto hide and there’s no reference for the TestMvc2 project and that is the reason we get compilation errors without even writing a single line of code.

So thanks to <VeryBigFont>ME</VeryBigFont> and <VerySmallFont>Microsoft</VerySmallFont>) , we’ve shown the world how to resolve a major issue and to live in Peace with the rest of humanity!