dotCover 2023.3 Help

General

dotCover options: Environment | General

This page of dotCover options summarizes general settings of the dotCover environment.

User Interface

Application icons theme

These radio buttons let you switch between different sets of dotCover UI icons. You can leave the default option of automatic selection or choose an icon set that will be most comfortable for you for the selected Visual Studio theme.

Source code symbol icons theme

These radio buttons let you switch between different sets of code symbol icons. You can leave the default option of automatic selection or choose an icon set that will be most comfortable for you for the selected Visual Studio theme.

Show managed memory usage in status bar

If this checkbox is selected, the amount of managed memory used by the whole process is shown in the rightmost position of the status bar. This value indicates not only the amount of managed memory used by ReSharper but also the amount of managed memory used by other third-party plug-ins and Visual Studio itself.

Caches

Store solution caches in

dotCover caches a lot of its temporary data. If you do not share the solution, you can choose solution folder. If you share your solution using a VCS, it is better to choose the system temp folder so that dotCover gets them out of the solution folder and therefore out of the way of your VCS. It is recommended to choose a custom folder. The problem with the 'User local settings folder' %LOCALAPPDATA% is that Visual Studio's directory watcher could be triggered when ReSharper writes to this folder, which happens very often.

You need to reopen your solution for changing caches location to take effect.

Clear Caches

Clears the cache of the current solution.

Normally, you do not need to clear solution cache, but some events (for example, sudden power off or an upgrade that skips several versions) may corrupt the cache, and that's when you need to use this button. Signals of corrupted cache may be a lot of unresolved code or absence of dotCover inspections in some files.

After clearing the cache you need to reopen your solution and wait a little while dotCover rebuilds the cache.

Solution Model

Read solution model directly from project/solution files

For most of its features , dotCover builds and maintains a model of the current solution. The model is cached and then used to instantly access any item in the solution structure.

By default, dotCover reads project and solution files independently of Visual Studio. This method is preferred because:

  • it does not use Visual Studio COM API and therefore does not block the UI thread,

  • it renders a more reliable model for projects targeting multiple frameworks.

However, it has some minor side effects:

  • dotCover needs projects and solution files to be up to date. Therefore, in case the files were edited but not saved, it will save them automatically.

  • Theoretically, there could be extremely rare coincidences when you can have a Cannot access file error during the build because dotCover has temporarily locked a project file. In this case, you can just start the build once again.

If some of the above is a problem, clear this checkbox to make dotCover read solution structure via Visual Studio COM API, which can be a bit slower.

Alternatively, you can configure this behavior per project: right-click the project in the Solution Explorer, select Edit project item properties, then choose Read project model from project file | True or False.

Last modified: 24 May 2022