One of the more popular feature requests for NCrunch lately has been to create a standalone version of NCrunch that can operate without Visual Studio.

I'm happy to say that this feature now exists!  There is now a headless version of NCrunch that works as a console tool, and can perform a single end-to-end run over a solution, writing the output as a series of useful reports including build results, test results and test coverage data.  The primary use case for this tool is on build/CI servers.  This means that you can now unlock the power of NCrunch as part of your build process, using parallel execution, distributed processing and metrics reporting as part of your centralised build.

As this tool is still in a beta state, it isn't yet available on the download page.  Instead, you can download it here:

http://downloads.ncrunch.net/NCrunch_Console_2.8.0.32.msi

http://downloads.ncrunch.net/NCrunch_Console_2.8.0.32.zip

For more information about this tool and what it can do, have a look at the console tool documentation page.  There's also a step-by-step guide to help you get it up and running.

I'm eager to hear from people putting this tool to use.  There's still more work going into the 2.8 build soon due for release, so there's a window of opportunity to refine this tool while it's still in beta.  Let me know what you think!

------------- Update 29th of July:

I've just updated the build above to also include suggested changes allowing people to specify their license details on the command line.  The license popup window was proving to be difficult to handle for many CI systems, so you can now specify the console tool license using:

ncrunch.exe /license "Joe Bloggs" 1234-1234-1234-1234-1234...

------------- Update 1st of August:

I've updated the build above again to include a fix for a problem people have been experiencing with the /license option on some servers.  This seems to have been related to the tool not correctly detecting the elevation status of the process, so it just kept trying to re-elevate itself.  The fix is in build 2.8.0.26.

------------- Update 18st of August:

Another update to the above build includes a fix for a problem that was causing the tool to unnecessarily copy many dependencies from the Program Files directory.  This should improve performance of the tool for people using projects with lots of MS imports.