How to get command prompt's output into a variable with PowerShell

Question

I'm using PowerShell v3.0 to start a new cmd.exe process, in which I then load up the Visual Studio Command Prompt to perform a build, like so:

Start-Process cmd.exe -ArgumentList $cmdArgumentsToRunMsBuildInVsCommandPrompt -WindowStyle $windowStyle -Wait

This works, and it opens a new command prompt window and I can see the build happen, and then when the build is finished the command prompt window closes. I would like to be able to get the text that is written to the command prompt window and store it in a variable, in order to inspect if the build passed or not. I tried using this, but it doesn't work; the $buildOutput variable is empty:

Start-Process cmd.exe -ArgumentList $cmdArgumentsToRunMsBuildInVsCommandPrompt -WindowStyle $windowStyle -Wait -OutVariable buildOutput
Write-Host "Build output = $buildOutput"

This makes sense since the cmd.exe process isn't returning any text; it is just writing it to it's own window. Is there a way for me to be able to store that text in a variable for the original powershell script to use? I know that I can provide a parameter to MsBuild to have it write the build log to a file, but I'm looking for a solution that doesn't involve writing to a log file and having to delete it later.

Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!

<# EDIT #>

Thanks for all of the responses so far! A popular suggestion has been to just call MsBuild.exe directly without using cmd.exe. The reason I need to go through cmd.exe is some projects don't build successfully if called directly from MsBuild.exe (e.g. XNA projects). Instead I need to call MsBuild.exe from the Visual Studio Command Prompt so that (I assume) all of the required environmental variables are set. I guess I could just call the VS Command Prompt directly, but it will have the same problem as calling cmd.exe too. If I can't find the VS Command Prompt I fallback to calling MsBuild.exe directly, so those answers are still appreciated.

Answer 1

You can always capture the output of console programs this way:

$output = [string](nuget.exe)

Here I used nuget ($output will contain the available commands list), but you can of course use msbuild.exe with the appropriate arguments.