tabs ↹ over ␣ ␣ ␣ spaces

by Jiří {x2} Činčura

Using PowerShell in post/pre build action in Visual Studio

15 Jul 2015 2 mins PowerShell, Visual Studio

Let’s say it. Batch files are plain simple for any real developer to use. PowerShell rocks. Sadly in Visual Studio in fairly useful feature of post/pre build actions you can by default use only batch files. Normally for full builds I use psake or I just script it on build server as next step, but today I needed it directly in Visual Studio. Time to start playing.

To make editing easier I decided to create file post-build.ps1 (I needed just post build action). This way I don’t need to go to Properties window just to change something in script. I then set this file to be copied to output directory.

The invocation is not difficult. Visual Studio executes the commands with output directory as working directory so I know where the relative paths start from. Then I just added simple command to post build action to execute the script.

powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -NoProfile -NonInteractive -File post-build.ps1

I’m setting ExecutionPolicy to Bypass in case somebody would not have it set to Unrestricted. 😉 I’m using NoProfile as I often use plain PowerShell and loading my profile would just slow it a bit. Of course NonInteractive because, well, there is no interaction possible. And finally the File with my script file. Because I set it to be copied to output directory and the commands are executed with output directory as working directory I can just use the name without any juggling with paths.

There’s one final piece I needed to do. Exit codes. If (or when 😉) the script fails it should return non zero exit code so the Visual Studio know something happened. I just put everything into try-catch block, but surely there’s multiple options (like PowerShell’s trap).

try {
	# code
}
catch {
	exit 1
}

And that’s it. Smooth.

Profile Picture Jiří Činčura is .NET, C# and Firebird expert. He focuses on data and business layers, language constructs, parallelism, databases and performance. For almost two decades he contributes to open-source, i.e. FirebirdClient. He works as a senior software engineer for Microsoft. Frequent speaker and blogger at www.tabsoverspaces.com.