Running Visual Studio Tests from a Network Drive

This afternoon I ran into an odd issue with Visual Studio 2013 that ate up an unreasonable amount of my time. I recently set up a new project using the built-in Git source control tools. To keep my project safer I put the repository on my network drive, which gets backed-up regularly. In the future we may get a central server, but for now this is good enough. The code was building and running with no problem until I tried running a unit test. No matter what I did Visual Studio couldn't detect any of my tests. The Test output window said:

------ Discover test started ------

Could not load file or assembly 'file:///U:\Repos\Scheduler\Scheduler\Scheduler.Web.Tests\bin\Debug\Scheduler.Web.Tests.dll' or one of its dependencies. Operation is not supported. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131515)

========== Discover test finished: 0 found (0:00:00.5040504) ==========

It took some digging, and a few failed attempts at other suggested solutions, but I finally found the workaround:

• Open a command prompt and type "setx COMPLUS_LoadFromRemoteSources 1"
• or
• Create an environment variable named COMPLUS_LoadFromRemoteSources
• Set the value to 1
• Restart Studio

Source: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/502353/running-unit-tests-from-network-drive

Incidentally, I came across another suggested fix that involved changing a "LoadFromRemoteSources" value in the devenv.exe.config file, but this did not work for me. The Environment Variable did the trick.