Exec powershell.exe hangs msbuild

Question

I'm currently looking into re-jigging our hacked together deployment system with something a little more elegant - Octopus. In doing so, I'm trying to get VS to package up a project when a release build is run. Well I have this fancy powershell script written and working, but when I try to EXEC from the msbuild script, visual studio just hangs!

At first I suspected the way stuff was being escaped in the shell, but I simplified it ridiculously, and it still freezes.

Here's the relevant MsBuild code:

    <PropertyGroup>
      <PowerShellExe Condition=" '$(PowerShellExe)'=='' ">
        %WINDIR%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe
      </PowerShellExe>
    </PropertyGroup>

    <Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Release|AnyCPU' ">
      <Exec Command="$(PowerShellExe) -NonInteractive -executionpolicy Unrestricted -command get-childitem" />
    </Target>

All it should do is give a directory listing. Calling this from cmd.exe works fine:

C:\Users\smithj>%WINDIR%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -noninteractive -executionpolicy unrestricted -command dir

Trying this:

msbuild Solution.sln /p:Configuration=Release

Gets me this:

AfterBuild:
  "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\\tf.exe" che
  ckout Package.nuspec
  Package.nuspec

        %WINDIR%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe
       -NonInteractive -executionpolicy Unrestricted -command dir

  Windows PowerShell
  Copyright (C) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

After that, it just hangs forever. Any suggestions are welcome.

Answer 1

Not sure you're going to like the answer. After a bit of play, it seems to be about the expansion of the property group. You put a new line in the value of PowerShellExe. This works fine:

<PropertyGroup>
    <PowerShellExe Condition=" '$(PowerShellExe)'=='' ">$(WINDIR)\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe</PowerShellExe>
  </PropertyGroup>

  <Target Name="AfterBuild">
    <Exec Command="$(PowerShellExe) -NonInteractive -executionpolicy bypass -command &quot;&amp;{get-childitem}&quot;" />
  </Target>