Visual Studio: Multiple post-build commands?

Question

Visual Studio 2008 lets me declare a command and attach it to the post-build event for a project. Like a lot of developers, I use it regularly to xcopy files to the applicat

Answer 1

There isn't a good solution to this problem. The call idea does cause other scripts to run. I have noticed that error detection will not work. Put 'exit /b 1' into FailMe.cmd The use 'call FailMe.cmd' in the post build steps. Notice the build does not fail? I am using VS 2017 building a C# project. Now try it with 'FailMe.cmd' The build now reports an error.

So you might be better off just using a single script, if error reporting is important.

Answer 2

Important: When executing a batch file, you must use the "call" statement on order the following lines to be executed. If you don´t use "call", the execution goes into the .bat and doesn´t return to the following lines. Same as on DOS prompt.

e.g.:

call MyBatch1.bat
call MyBatch2.bat

Answer 3

Each command should be on a separate line. What I found though is that if there's an error executing one of those commands the whole post-build fails and so you'll need to try each post-build command one at a time to debug.

Answer 4

Adding to womp's answer:

If you have multiple property sheets with something to do on the same build event you can do the following to chain the commands:

%(Command)
echo foo

where %(Command) expands to the previous value of the command.

Personally I do this for all build events, even if I currently do not have inherited commands, because this ensures there will be no problems if I add property sheets later on.

Answer 5

The approach suggested by womp works in Visual Studio 2015/2017 (Windows), but doesn't work in Visual Studio for Mac (Preview), which seems to execute only the first of the commands. The only approach that I found working in both Mac and Windows versions of Visual Studio was chaining 2 MSBuild commands:

<Target Name="AfterResolveReferences">
<Exec Command="path\MyFirstCommand.exe -parameters" />
</Target>
<Target Name="MySecondCommand" AfterTargets="AfterResolveReferences" >
<Exec Command="path\MySecondCommand.exe -parameters" />
</Target>

The above example uses "AfterResolveReferences" event but should obviously work for PostBuild event too.

Answer 6

You can type in as many post build commands as you want. Just separate them by newlines.

Here's an example from one of my projects.