Excluded projects block Team Foundation Build test step

Question

A followup to this question, Building select projects only with Team Foundation Build: I’ve now successfully “isolated” three of the projects in a solution with 20+ projects. One of the three projects is a test project, which contains unit tests for one of the other projects (a class library).

Team Build is running fine, just the three projects are included in the process. However, when I run the tests in the test project as a part of the build, the tests pass BUT the build fails on the “Running Tests” step, and I get this message in the build log:

TESTTOOLSTASK : Instrumentation warning : cannot find binary C:\Users...[local path to a missing dll].
The previous error was converted to a warning because the task was called with ContinueOnError=true.

The same message is repeated for three different dlls, which are part of the solution, but I’m 100% certain that there are no references to these dlls from the three projects I’m trying to build. How do they get included in my build/test process? And how do I deal with this error?

Answer 1

It turns out the three mysterious projects had Code Coverage enabled, which caused them to be referenced in the tests.
I also had Database Project in the solution which seemed to screw things up even further.