Why do my tests fail with System.Security.VerificationException?

Question

I'm in the process of migrating one of my projects from VS2008 to VS2010. Now that I converted all of my projects in the solution to .NET 4.0 (Client Profile) when I run the test harness, almost all tests fail with the following exception:

System.Security.VerificationException: Operation could destabilize the runtime.

I've been unable to determine why this exception occurs. The tests run all fine when I run them in debug mode.

The entire solution is available for download here.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

First step: Run the peverify tool against the built assemblies (both test and application). It may give you some output that helps pinpoint the issue.

Second step: Can you give us the stack trace or exception output? The one time I actually saw an error with this was in .net 2 and was a compiler error - I had to slightly alter the code to make a call compile as a virtual rather than direct call. Giving us the stack and the lines of code in question would be helpful.

One thing I want to point out is that apps running under the 4.0 client profile have different security behaviors than running under 3.5. You could try adding [assembly: SecurityRules(SecurityRuleSet.Level1)] to your assemblyinfo.cs to run under the "old style" rules to help narrow it down.

Answer 2

The problem seems to be related to the Code Coverage you activated. Disabling code coverage solves the issue. You could put the following in your AssemblyInfo.cs:

[assembly: SecurityRules(SecurityRuleSet.Level1, SkipVerificationInFullTrust = true)]

and reactivate code coverage.