Release Notes: February 11, 2018

xUnit.net v2 2.4 Beta 1

A new feature called "test method display options" is available. This features some built-in transformations of test names automatically, in an attempt to generate more readable test names. This comprises a set of flags that can be enabled for individual transformations. For more information, see the methodDisplayOptions section of Configuration Files.
Support for reporting tests to VSTS has been added. Like our support for TeamCity and AppVeyor, this is a reporter that is automatically enabled when tests are running inside of VSTS. Documentation on how to enable this (with a sample YAML build definition) will be forthcoming shortly.
Data theories can now pass DateTime, DateTimeOffset, and Guid values as strings, and they will be converted automatically to the matching argument type. This is most useful with [InlineData], which does not allow any of these types natively.
BUG: Fixed an issue where implicit and explicit conversion operator methods were not always used when converting theory data.
BUG: JSON configuration for maxParallelThreads did not properly support the special values of 0 and -1.
BUG: Fixed an issue with some incorrectly escaped characters when reporting to TeamCity (which caused some test names to get mangled or truncated).

Swapped -noappdomain for -appdomains [required|ifavailable|denied], to better align with the values from configuration files. The old switch is still supported, but no longer listed in the help page. The default value is ifavailable.
Updated -help to show that -method can take wildcards.
BUG: Fixed an issue where invoking the console runner without arguments could throw an exception rather than showing the help page.

When targeting netcoreapp2.0 or later, you can now generate the full set of output reports: HTML, XML v1, XML v2, and NUnit 2.5. (When targeting netcoreapp1.0, you are still limited to just XML v2 reports.)
Swapped -noappdomain for -appdomains [required|ifavailable|denied], to better align with the values from configuration files. The old switch is still supported, but no longer listed in the help page. The default value is ifavailable.
Updated -help to show that -method can take wildcards.
Optimized (and cached) assembly resolution for .NET Core projects.
BUG: Fixed issues related to running on operating systems that were currently unknown to .NET Core (for example, macOS 10.13). This usually surfaced as an inability to load platform-specific assemblies when running on these platforms.
BUG: Fixed issues related to libraries not loading from the dependency list. This surfaced most commonly as failures with MVC TestHost.
BUG: Fixed an issue related to .NET SDK 2.0.3 which was causing failures to find the 2.0 runtime (when the 2.0.0 runtime was the one desired).
BUG: Fixed an issue with using relative paths instead of absolute paths when setting the working directory for executing tests.

Updated the AppDomains='value' attribute to accept all the legal values (required, ifavailable, and denied), to better align with the values from configuration files. This was previously a boolean value, so the old values are still supported (true maps to required, and false maps to denied). The default value is ifavailable.
BUG: The FailSkips attribute was previously not settable. This has been fixed.

The RunSettings file can now include a reporter (i.e., quiet, teamcity, etc.) The element is at /RunSettings/RunConfiguration/ReporterSwitch, with the reporter switch name being the inner text of the element (i.e., <ReporterSwitch>quiet</ReporterSwitch>).
Experimental support for Test Platform v2 with UWP has been added, for future Visual Studio releases.
BUG: In some cases, having a trait with an empty value caused test discovery and/or execution failure.
BUG: Fixed an issue with test method names that contained colons. This was most commonly seen with F# tests.
BUG: Fixed an issue where passing incompatible test method data to params arrays on data theories caused test discovery to fail (and would show as forever discovering in the Test Explorer UI).

The reflection abstraction for CLR attributes now allows field setters (in addition to property setters) when reflecting on attribute constructor arguments. While there were no attributes in xUnit.net itself that used field setters, this will allow extensibility authors to write custom extension attributes that use fields rather than properties for optional attribute arguments.