Coverlet: Fails to install in Visual Studio 2017 OSX

[dhowe]

Error: Could not install package 'coverlet.msbuild 1.2.0'. You are trying to install this package into a project that targets '.NETFramework,Version=v4.6', but the package does not contain any assembly references or content files that are compatible with that framework. For more information, contact the package author.

VS2017: v7.4.3 Build 10, with NUnit
OSX: v10.13.4

[coderpatros]

Can you target 4.6.1? I'm pretty sure .net standard 2.0, which coverlet targets, isn't supported in 4.6 but is in 4.6.1.

[dhowe]

I believe I need to stay at 4.6 for unity...

[coderpatros]

This tool is for measuring code coverage of .net core projects. So you probably need to use something else. Unfortunately the only other free open tool I know of for full framework projects is Windows only.

[dhowe]

I wonder if I should be using .NET framework or .NET core (or even .NET Standard) in the first place... As there are no unity-dependent parts of the library, I believe I can do any of these. I just need it to be compatible with unity in the end... Am I correct that changing the project type to either Core or Standard class library (assuming no Framework-specific APIs) would solve this problem with coverlet (and possibly similar problems with other tools) ?

[coderpatros]

If I'm understanding you correctly... with your library target .net standard 1.3 or lower. You can then use it in a project targeting full framework 4.6.

Then implement your unit tests in a .net core project. That way you can reference coverlet in the unit test project and measure code coverage for the .net standard library project.

[dhowe]

ok, so I recreated the project as .NET Core 2.0 and coverlet now works nicely (70%)... thanks for your help

[coderpatros]

No worries @dhowe

[tonerdo]

So the root of the problem here is that coverlet isn't packaged as a usual library, this means that there are not binaries in the lib folder of the NuGet package. All Coverlet binaries go into the build folder. I'm guessing that's where Visual Studio for Mac hiccups. Also, I personally don't think there's anything stopping coverlet from working on the full .NET Framework, I just haven't had a chance to test it and fix any edge cases

[dhowe]

That would be great.
An unrelated question: what's the best way to figure out what code is not being covered? I get 70% in the summary, but looking through the JSON output isn't very helpful in this regard...

[tonerdo]

It's best to use a graphical visualization tool like ReportGenerator with the opencover output or you can use a cloud service like Codecov or Coveralls

[MarcoRossignoli]

@dhowe any news?
Feel free to close if solved.