The specified module 'DistributedCacheAdministration' was not loaded because no valid module file was found in any module directory.

What to do if you get this error when unit testing Windows Server AppFabric Caching

Being new to unit testing code that invokes PowerShell I ran into this problem when trying to test code that was using the Windows Server AppFabric Caching cmdlets.

System.Management.Automation.Runspaces.RunspaceOpenModuleLoadException was unhandled by user code
  Message=One or more errors occurred processing the module 'DistributedCacheAdministration' specified in the InitialSessionState object used to create this runspace. See the ErrorRecords property for a complete list of errors. The first error was: The specified module 'DistributedCacheAdministration' was not loaded because no valid module file was found in any module directory.
  Source=System.Management.Automation
  WasThrownFromThrowStatement=false

I borrowed some code from Stephen Kaufman’s blog to create a cache in my unit test.  But when I ran it I got the exception above.  This is happening because the Visual Studio Unit Test tool by default runs tests in a 32 bit process on my x64 machine.

What I need to do is to force Visual Studio to run the tests in an x64 process.  You can do this by altering the local.testsettings file in your solution items.

Step 1 – Open the local.testsettings file

Step 2 – Set the Hosts to run in 64 bit

Note: The default is to force the tests to run in 32 bit processes.