How to invoke MSBuild from PowerShell using & operator?

Question

I've just tested this on PowerShell v1.0. Setup is as follows:

 Id CommandLine  -- -----------   1 $msbuild = "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\msbuild.exe"   4 $a = "C:\some\project\or\other\src\Solution.sln /target:Clean /target:Build" 

.

This line fails with an unintuitive error message:

 Id CommandLine  -- -----------   5 & $msbuild $a 

.

This line fails because & expects the first argument to be the command itself.

 Id CommandLine  -- -----------  10 & "$msbuild $a" 

.

This line works:

 Id CommandLine  -- -----------  16 cmd /c "$msbuild $a" 

.

Please explain. I'm more interested in why the & syntax isn't working, than an MSBuild-specific workaround.

Answer 1

Ugh.

$collectionOfArgs = @("C:\some\project\or\other\src\Solution.sln",      "/target:Clean", "/target:Build") & $msbuild $collectionOfArgs 

This works. & takes a collection of arguments, so you must split up strings containing multiple arguments into a collection of string arguments.