Build and test

Status: Current. How-to guide for maintainers. The build and the tests were run locally on Windows 11 on 2026-10-19 with the tools named below; the result is recorded in Local run.

Prerequisites

• Windows. The VSTO host needs full MSBuild with the VSTO targets, and the interop implementation needs the Office primary interop assemblies, which the build resolves from the GAC or from Visual Studio’s Visual Studio Tools for Office\PIA\Office15 folder.
• Visual Studio with the Office/VSTO workload. Taskfile.yml finds MSBuild.exe with vswhere.
• The .NET SDK 10. There is no global.json; the SDK on the machine is used.
• Task: winget install Task.Task or choco install go-task.
• Microsoft Excel, to run the interop test passes. It must open without a modal dialog; see Local run.
• Node.js 24 and npm for the documentation website; see the website instructions.

Build with Task

Taskfile.yml replaces the earlier Nuke build. Every target runs at most once per invocation. The configuration is Debug unless CONFIGURATION=Release is passed.

Target	What it does
task	test, then pack.
task clean	Deletes and recreates artifacts/.
task restore	dotnet tool restore, which finds no manifest and restores nothing, then restores the solution with MSBuild, including the VSTO project’s packages.config.
task compile	Rebuilds the four test projects, and through them everything else, with MSBuild.
task test	Runs the five test passes into artifacts/tests/; every pass runs even when an earlier one fails, and the target fails at the end when any pass failed.
task pack	Packs Allors.Excel and Allors.Excel.Headless with dotnet pack and Allors.Excel.Interop with MSBuild, with symbols, into artifacts/nuget/.
task ci	test.

task compile
task test
task pack CONFIGURATION=Release

Test passes

Pass	Command	Tests	Needs Excel
interop-dotnet	dotnet test of Allors.Excel.Interop.Tests for net462 and net10.0, to a .trx file	ChunkTests, 11 facts per framework	No
interop-framework	xunit.console on Allors.Excel.Interop.Tests for net462	The same 11 facts	No
interop-vsto	xunit.console on Allors.Excel.Interop.Vsto.Tests	The 46 shared facts	Yes
headless	xunit.console on Allors.Excel.Headless.Tests	The 46 shared facts	No
interop-dna	xunit.console on Allors.Excel.Interop.Dna.Tests	The 46 shared facts	Yes

xunit.console.exe comes from the xunit.runner.console package in the NuGet cache; the test projects reference it so that restore downloads it. The Excel passes start a visible Excel instance for every test and open a copy of data/blank.xlsx; Architecture describes the fixture. Expect Excel windows to appear and disappear for about two minutes per pass.

Local run

On 2026-10-19, on Windows 11 with Visual Studio 2026 Enterprise, the .NET SDK 10.0.402, Task 3.54.0 and Microsoft 365 Excel 16.0.20430, task test built every project and ran all five passes. The two passes without Excel and the headless pass passed: 11 chunk facts on each of the three runs and 46 headless facts. The two Excel passes failed 34 and 36 of their 46 facts, for one reason: every Excel instance the fixture started showed the Microsoft 365 privacy dialog, which is modal, so the object model rejected calls with 0x800AC472 and RPC_E_CALL_REJECTED. The first fixture failed in its constructor and leaked its Excel instance, which was closed by hand afterwards. Open Excel once on the machine and dismiss its dialogs before running the Excel passes.

CI passes all 149 tests on both of its matrix legs; the run for the merge of pull request 24 on 2026-06-03 took about fifteen minutes per leg, including the Office installation.

CI

The CI workflow runs on windows-latest for pushes and pull requests to main, except when only docs/, the documentation workflow or AGENTS.md changed. Two matrix legs, Excel64 and Excel32, install Microsoft 365 Business through Chocolatey, import the VSTO signing certificate src/Allors.Excel.Interop.Vsto/ExcelAddIn.VSTO_TemporaryKey.pfx, install Task and run task ci CONFIGURATION=Release. The Excel64 leg also packs and uploads the packages as an artifact. The test results are published as check runs and uploaded as artifacts. A change to README.md runs CI, because the readme is part of every package.

Versioning

version.json sets the version 1.1 for Nerdbank.GitVersioning, with main and tags vX.Y.Z as public release branches. A build on main is versioned 1.1.<git height>; a build on another branch carries the commit, such as 1.1.1-g10d15c6665 observed when packing the documentation branch. dotnet nbgv get-version shows the version of a checkout; the nbgv tool is not in a manifest, so install it globally or read version.json.

Release

Nothing publishes automatically. To release:

1. Make sure version.json has the intended major and minor version and that main is green.
2. Tag the commit vX.Y.Z and push the tag. The Release workflow checks the tag out, imports the VSTO certificate, installs Task, runs task pack CONFIGURATION=Release, logs in to nuget.org through trusted publishing as allors-nuget in the nuget-release environment, pushes the .nupkg files with --skip-duplicate and creates a GitHub release with generated notes and the packages attached. The workflow can also be run by hand with an existing tag.
3. Update the note in README.md and in Packages and versions that says the published packages predate the current API.

The workflow had not run by 2026-10-19; the repository’s only tag was 1.0.1, and the packages on nuget.org, 1.0.73, come from the earlier Azure Pipelines build.

Documentation

The website in docs/ has its own checks; the website instructions list them, and the Documentation workflow runs them for changes to docs/, its workflow file, AGENTS.md, README.md and version.json, for the /excel/ and / deployment paths. Publication of the website is a manual step described there.