Why won't MSBuild build a project with a dot in the name?

Question

The Story So Far

I've got a nice solution with a desktop application project, a few library projects, and a couple of development tools projects (also desktop applications). At the moment, my build server outputs all of the code into one OutputPath. So we end up with

drop-x.y.z\     Company.MainApplication.exe      <-- main application      Company.MainApplicationCore.dll  <-- libraries     Helper.exe                       <-- developer tools     Grapher.exe     Parser.exe     ...                              <-- the rest of the output 

But, we're growing up and people outside of our team want access to our tools. So I want to organize the output. I decided that what we would want is a different OutputPath per executable project

drop-x.y.z\   Company.MainApplication\     Company.MainApplication.exe      <-- main application      Company.MainApplicationCore.dll  <-- libraries     ...                              <-- application specific output   Helper\     Helper.exe                       <-- developer tools     ...                              <-- tool specific output   Grapher\     Grapher.exe     ...   Parser\     Parser.exe     ... 

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What I Did

I found this simple command. I like it because it retains all the Solution working-dir context that makes msbuild a pain.

msbuild /target:<ProjectName> 

For example, from my solution root as a working directory, I would call

PS> msbuild /target:Helper /property:OutputPath="$pwd\out\Helper" 

I'm testing this from PowerShell, so that $pwd resolves to the full path to my working directory, or the Solution root in this case. I get the output I desire.

However, when I run this command

PS> msbuild /target:Company.MainApplication /property:OutputPath="$pwd\out\Company.MainApplication" 

I get the following error output (there's no more information, I ran with /verbosity:diagnostic)

The target "Company.MainApplication" does not exist in the project.

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What I Need

The command fails on any project with a dot or dots in the name. I tried with many combinations of working directories and properties. I tried several ways of escaping the property values. I also tried running the command from a <Task> in a targets file.

I need to know either
A) How to fix this command to work property
B) How to achieve the same output with minimal friction

Answer 1

Try using an underscore as an escape character for the dot in the target parameter, e.g.

msbuild /target:Company_MainApplication /property:OutputPath="$pwd\out\Company.MainApplication"