While making a build automation I came across an issue. Along with upgrading Visual Studio 2013, the path to MSBuild has moved as described here http://timrayburn.net/blog/visual-studio-2013-and-msbuild/
I've updated my system path to point to this new location for msbuild. Using a regular cmd prompt msbuild resolves just fine. But running my scripts in powershell, it seems to still pick up the old one, and showing the issue as described in the link. How can I see and change where powershell and psake picks up msbuild from, so I can point to the expected version?
PSake supports more MSBuild versions on one box. You can choose version and platform eg. 4.0x64 with framework directive. Path to MSBuild tools is not taken from $env:path but is computed. It uses registry to find proper path.
VS 2013 and MSBuild Tools are supported since PSake 4.3
In PS type [Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path")
Do you see both paths? In what sequence do they appear? What occurs in cmd vs ps when you switch the order?
Related
I have a Xamarin.Forms project wherein the Android project is built in VSTS using a hosted build agent which runs a powershell script at run-time.
I need to run the same powershell script against the Xamarin.iOS which uses an On Premise Mac Build Agent. But how?
I found this answer and a comment under the answer also had the same question regarding parameters, so I am posting the solution here since the issue is slightly different and that question has an accepted answer.
First off, I installed powershell on the mac using these instructions and I modified the shell script task to include the Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) environmental variables that I wanted to pass to the powershell script.
Next, I pass the arguments through to the called powershell script by slightly modifying the shell script mentioned by the referenced answer.
#!/bin/bash
powershell ./Version.ps1 $1 $2
Finally, in the powershell script, I catch the arguments that have been passed through using using param like this:
param([string]$version, [string]$path)
Wherein I can now use the variables $version and $path which contain the original arguments entered in VSTS to the needs of my powershell script.
I installed VSTS build agent on mac to build xamarin iOS project. Builds worked fine until I added powershell build step.
Even though I installed powershell for mac (https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell) and re-installed the agent, VSTS complains it does not have agent that is capable to run the build.
No agent could be found with the following capabilities:
DotNetFramework, Xamarin.iOS, npm
When I disable the build step, builds work just fine.
Is it possible to run powershell build step on Mac?
As MrHinsh clarified, the PowerShell task cannot be used on Mac.
As a workaround I used ShellScript task:
With the following bash script:
#!/bin/bash
powershell ./SetAppVersion.ps1
Also, the powershell installer did not seem to add powershell to my PATH so I had to add it:
$ export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/microsoft/powershell/6.0.0-alpha.16
If you're sure that DotNetFramework is installed then you can go to the Agent Queues settings and add a custom Capability to it called exactly that.
That should allow it to run but it might fail after that if the agent can't actually find them, but it might also succeed so it's probably worth a try.
No, you can't use a PowerShell task on a Mac, only node tasks are supported.
PowerShell tasks as currently written in PowerShell3 which is not supported on Mac. You can request that the team implement this on http://visualstudio.uservoice.com
In TFS build go to Agents Queues=>Capablilities=>Add variable named as DotNetFramework and give value for mac agent's dotnet framework path.
It's fix for the issue "No agent could be found with the following capabilities:DotNetFramework"
This is a follow-up to the accepted answer to address a question in a comment which I also had.
Thanks to spatialguy for posting and finding a simple solution to this problem. I had the same problem as KeithA45:
QUESTION: What if you wanted to do the same, but also pass arguments to the Bash script which passes them to the Powershell script?
I found a solution to this, first off, I modified the shell script task to include the Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) environmental variables that I wanted to pass to the powershell script.
Next, I pass the arguments through to the called powershell script by slightly modifying the shell script mentioned by the accepted answer.
#!/bin/bash
powershell ./Version.ps1 $1 $2
Finally, in the powershell script, I catch the arguments that have been passed through using using param like this:
param([string]$version, [string]$path)
Wherein I can now use the variables $version and $path which contain the original arguments entered in VSTS to the needs of my powershell script.
Things seem to have moved forward because I ran successfully today a PowerShell#2 task on a Mac Self-Hosted Agent from an Azure DevOps build pipeline.
By checking "Enable system diagnostics" when queuing the build, the log shows me that the task found itself the path to the PowerShell Core (pwsh) that I installed on my Mac with the help of Homebrew (brew cask install powershell - see https://learn.microsoft.com/fr-fr/powershell/scripting/install/installing-powershell-core-on-macos).
I was trying to use Nuget as a software deployment system (repository, versioning and delivery) - idea from Octopus. Previously I was packaging ASP.NET sites into a self-extracting RAR archives with a .CMD startup scripts embeded. Now I'm trying to use Nuget creating puckages during automated build. The issue is that the package installation scripts (tools\Install.ps1 or tools\Init.ps1) do not execute if the package is being installed using command line:
nuget.exe install <package_id> -OutputDirectory <install_folder> -source <local_repo>
Same scripts are able to execute when package installed from Visual Studio Package Manager or Console.
I do not see why this shouldn't be possible given omnipresence of PowerShell.
Am I missing something or this is behaviour by design? Will appreciate you help.
Yes, we did consider MSDeploy but we already have install scripts that do the same thing and give more control and we need some strong package management and repository for build artifacts (something that Java folks do with Maven).
As of today, the powershell scripts are not invoked from doing installations from command line.
One reason for this is that, in general, most of the install/init actions are tied to dte and the visual studio project and doesn't add much value to be able to run it from outside VS.
We have a backlog item for enabling support for exe based scripts too in addition to powershell.
Do PowerShell scripts run under Mono?
I would like to run them on a Mac.
There is an open source version of PowerShell called Pash designed for Mono. It is not complete, but may be able to do what you need:
http://pash.sourceforge.net/ (this project has not been active for quite some time)
Checkout the re-start at: Pash-Project on GitHub.
Powershell has now been open-sourced and is available here.
As of right now it is V6.0 alpha. I've been running it on OS X for a lot of file operations and it has been working very well.
Note that you may need to install .Net Core to get Powershell to behave properly. Also note that system.management.automation.runspaces works right out of the box (for runspacepools).
The powershell.exe stub is actually a native win32 program, not a managed assembly. It may be possible in the future to host the System.Management.Automation assembly in Mono, but I'm fairly sure it doesn't work at the moment.
My buildbot has been running for 3 years using devenv.com to compile the projects on Windows.
Now devenv.com has troubles to build for 64 bits versions: passing the configuration as "Debug|x64" generates command line errors because of the pipe character. Escaping and enclosing between quotes result into other errors, some because of the spaces in the directory names, some because of strangely understood command line.
I tried both vcbuild.exe, and MSBuild.exe. vcbuild.exe works perfectly: I'd like to stick to it. MSBuild.exe, on the other side, has a completely strange and complicated output that my coworkers feel terrible. But it is touted everywhere as THE way to build.
The question is: which of devenv.com, vcbuild.exe, and MSBuild.exe is the method that is most likely to last in time?
MSBuild (before Visual Studio 2010/.NET 4) doesn't itself build C++ projects. It calls out to vcbuild.exe. So if you are happy not using MSBuild then I would stick to that for the C++ projects. For managed projects (and for C++ using VS 2010) use MSBuild.
MSBuild is the method "most likely to last". VCBuild.exe is dead; it's last release was 2008. MSBuild 4.0 will still use it, if it needs to build a VC project from VS2008 or earlier. As for devenv.exe -- of course, it's just headless Visual Studio. Functionally it is the same as hitting build in VS. That means that these days, it's essentially just handing off to MSBuild, but sometimes with less parallelism than msbuild.exe will get. The main reason you might still have to use devenv.exe is .vdproj (Deployment) projects. These legacy things have a build process hard coded into VS. I recommend an alternative like WiX or Installshield which are MSBuild based. Not long now until everything build in VS is MSBuild.
In short -- MSBuild is the future, use it unless you have deployment projects or other special circumstances.
Dan
I ran into the same problem, and solved it by Windows-shell-escaping the pipe character:
"Debug^|Win32"
msbuild.exe does not (did not?) know how to build setup projects. devenv.exe does.