Call powershell script in post-built with parameters

Question

I\'m trying to get Powershell to run my PS script in post built - but somehow it doesn\'t work like it\'s supposed to:

Following command in Post-Build:

Answer 1

Because of file system virtualization, you can't really specify the path to the 64-bit version of PowerShell from a 32-bit process (ie Visual Studio - which hosts the msbuild engine). One hack-ish way to work around this is to create a 64-bit launcher that runs as 64-bit and will launch the 64-bit version of PowerShell. Here's a simple C# program that will do this:

using System;
using System.Diagnostics;

class App
{
  static int Main(string[] args)
  {
    Process process = Process.Start("PowerShell.exe", String.Join(" ", args));
    process.WaitForExit();
    return process.ExitCode;
  }
}

Be sure to compile this as 64-bit like so:

csc .\PowerShell64.cs /platform:x64

Then, from your post-build event execute this launcher exe passing it the parameters you want to invoke 64-bit PowerShell with. Also, with PowerShell 2.0 I would recommend using the File parameter to execute a script e.g.:

c:\path\PowerShell64.exe -File "$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\CreateSite.ps1" auto

That said, surely there has to be some other way (utility) that launches exes from a 64-bit process.