Today during work I had a very annoying issue – whenever I’ve run the project unit test suite (using MSTest) Visual Studio disappeared. This is the first time I saw it crash like this without any error message or even an exception it just vanished.
I’ve gone through the regular routine of restarting windows and re started visual studio but it didn’t help, my helpful co-worker even suggested that I re-install visual studio 2008.
Due to the fact that installing VS2008 would have cost me a few hours of my time I’ve decided to investigate this issue.
A bit of searching showed the following error (using Event Viewer):
Now I had something I can search for at the Internet. Simple search showed me that the issue also occours when using Azure & ASP.NET MVC and seemed to originate from a bug in visual studio when on of its add-ons uses .NET 3.5.
It looked like I needed to patch the .NET framework to fix the problem. Although it seemed a bit excessive (not to mention risky) I’ve downloaded the hotfix and installed it.
After (yet another) windows restart I opened visual studio and run the test suite and it worked!
Helper Code 
Too bad the link to the hotfix doesn't work anymore 😦
Damn! I hate it when they move stuff on the internet. It was hard enough finding the hotfix the first time.
I found this after some searching:
Rollup QFE for Visual Studio 2010 Test Tools
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=36847
I downloaded it and can now run unit tests again.
My Boss still want's to use VS2005.
So i can't get the hotfix any more ?
Is this normal that MS removes hotfixes ?
VSTest only crashes when i run a lot of tests, like 400.
So, i'm running now the first 350 than the next and so on.
But this doesn't look like automation at the moment.
But if my Boss want's to use MS, it's his own fault of course.