Why do all Pre-build or Post-build events in Visual Studio fail with exit code 1?

Question

My goal is copying an .exe file from a bin folder of solution A to another solutions B resource folder on the post build event of solution A.
I created the necessary xcopy command and tried it out in powershell: It works perfectly.
Whenever I add any command to the actions in VS build fails with: "#command# exited with code 1", where #command# is, for example, the xcopy command.
I tried running VS as admin and currently I tried just running a .bat file that contains "@echo off @exit 0". That too leads to "#command# exited with code 1".

Have some example of what I tried out as VS post/pre-build command:
call "projdir\test.bat"
call projdir\test.bat
"projdir\test.bat"
projdir\test.bat
... I tried projdir as "$(ProjectPath)" and manual path.

I put output to verbose and found the following:
The command "C:\Users\Traubenfuchs\AppData\Local\Temp" is written incorrectly or couldn't be found. (That folder actually exists but I don't know what it wants to do it.)
The same thing happens when I put an xcopy command in pre/post build.

Anyone knows what I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

Recently I met similar problem.

About your "hello world" post-build event : try to call powershell directly

powershell -command "write-output 'hello world'; exit 0"

=================

My pre-build event looks like :

powershell -file scriptPath.ps1

My scriptPath.ps1 looks like :

<my epic powershell code>
...
exit 0

Note that without "exit 0" at the end I recieved return code 1 from my script.

Answer 2

We had this issue because of a "Software Restriction Policy" set up in a domain GPO. It appears that pre and post builds create a .cmd batch file in the temp folder. Here's what the logging showed me:

cmd.exe (PID = 8456) identified C:\Users\brian\AppData\Local\Temp\tmp733425d2c0604973a90a0a175c13353e.exec.cmd as Disallowed using default rule, Guid = {11015445-d282-4f86-96a2-9e485f593302}

To fix this we modified the GPO that controlled the SRP so that it did not include .cmd files. After all, the goal of SRP is to block executable malware, not batch files. I may get some security blowback because of this. Hopefully someone knows a better way to fix this issue.