Clarification on Using dotCover for IIS Web Apps, Azure Web APIs, and Gauge Automation

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Thiruvengadam Gopalakrishnan
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Hi JetBrains Support Team,

We are exploring the use of dotCover for end-to-end code coverage across multiple components in our project and would like your guidance on feasibility and setup details.

Our setup includes:

  • Web Application hosted in IIS (ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC mix).
  • Multiple microservices (Web APIs) hosted on Azure App Service (AKS).
  • Automation test suite written using the Gauge framework (C#).

Our goal is to:

  1. Start dotCover analysis before executing the Gauge specs.
  2. Collect code coverage for both the IIS-hosted web application and the Azure-hosted Web API services while the specs run.
  3. Generate a combined coverage report (HTML or XML format) after test completion.

Could you please confirm whether the above scenario is achievable using dotCover? Specifically, we’d like to know:

  • Can dotCover attach to IIS worker processes (w3wp.exe) for coverage collection during manual or automated testing?
  • Can dotCover capture coverage from multiple remote Web API services (running in Azure AKS) triggered by our Gauge automation?
  • If supported, what would be the recommended configuration or approach to collect and merge coverage snapshots across these services?

Any example scripts, configuration samples, or product limitations in this setup would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your support.

Best regards,
Gopalakrishnan T

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Krakhil44
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Hi,

We faced a similar challenge and wanted to share our experience and workaround that worked manually using dotCover Standalone.

Our Setup:

  • Web-based application hosted on IIS.
  • Multiple components including APIs and UI.
  • Selenium-based test automation in C#.

What Worked for Us (Manual Process):

  1. Hosted the application on IIS.
  2. Collected all relevant .pdb files and placed them in a single folder.
  3. Opened dotCover Standalone and created a new run configuration for IIS:
    • Selected File > Cover Application.
    • Chose IIS as the application type.
    • Specified the URL of the hosted application.
    • Used Edit Symbol Search Policy to point to the folder containing .pdb files.
  4. Started the coverage session.
  5. Ran our Selenium automation tests manually.
  6. dotCover captured coverage across multiple w3wp.exe instances.
  7. After test completion, we stopped the coverage session and dotCover automatically:
    • Collected individual snapshot files for each IIS thread.
    • Merged them into a single coverage report.

This gave us accurate and complete coverage results.

Issue: We are unable to replicate this setup using dotCover CLI in our Azure DevOps pipeline. Despite configuring the CLI with similar parameters (cover-iis, --instance, send GetSnapshotAndKillChildren), it fails to attach to the IIS process or collect coverage reliably.

Would appreciate any guidance or confirmation if this is a known limitation in version 2025.2.20251003.202247.

Thanks,
K. R. Akhil

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Tom Luo
Created

Krakhil44 Running coverage to IIS was supported until 2025.2. On 2025.2, we have removed support for IIS due to technical reasons. We may restore the support in an upcoming release, likely in 2025.3, but this has not been determined yet.

Thanks,

Tom


 

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