Visual Studio 2010 Output Panel Not Updating Postbuild Output

Question

I just recently upgraded from VS2008 to VS2010. Because I do a lot of remote debugging (over VPN), I use Post-Build events to copy the compiled binaries and PDB's to the target machine before running. I do this by calling a batch file that (among other things) executes Robocopy.

In VS2008, the Output panel would display robocopy's output in realtime, i.e.:

5>          Newer             421376    RadarController.pdb
5>    0%  
5>   14%  
5>   29%  
5>   43%  
5>   58%  
5>   72%  
...

However, in VS2010, rather than showing the Post-Build event's progress little by little, it simply locks up until the entire event is complete - then the output all appears at once. This is a particular problem when copying over a slowish net connection, as I have no idea what's going on for potentially minutes at a time. There's no way to guess if the copy will go on for 5 seconds or 5 minutes; I wouldn't even know it was copying, if I wasn't already familiar with the order of the compiler events.

Is this a known bug in 2010, or does anyone know of an existing workaround?

Thanks!

Edit 1: The project is C#.

Edit 2: The exact Robocopy command I'm using is robocopy.exe . \\192.168.5.7\Release /NJS /NJH /Z /W:1 /R:5 /E

Answer 1

Considering it appears like MS does not want to fix this issue soon, and us still wanting to move forward to VS.NET 2010, we've devised the following workaround. It is not ideal but good enough for us.

Most of our long running post-build events we only run when building for release, not during general software development. So on those occasions we run those events in an external command window so we can monitor the progress.

We use the unix tee command (grabbed of the net somewhere) to add the output into the output window after the script has completed.

In the postbuild event we have:

@@echo off
cd "$(ProjectDir)"
START /WAIT cmd /c PostBuildStub.cmd "$(SolutionDir)" "$(ProjectDir)" "$(TargetDir)" "$(SolutionPath)" "$(ConfigurationName)" 
ECHO PostBuild output:
TYPE $(TargetDir)postbuildlog.txt
ECHO Done.

So the postbuild event starts the external cmd window and dumps the log file into the output window when done.

PostBuildStub.cmd looks like this:

@echo off
echo.

set SolutionDir=%~1
set ProjectDir=%~2
set TargetDir=%~3
set SolutionFile=%~4
set ConfigurationName=%~5

CD /D "%ProjectDir%"

CALL PostBuild.cmd %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 | "%SolutionDir%\bin\tee.exe" "%TargetDir%\postbuildlog.txt"

if errorlevel 1 exit 1

The postbuild stub creates the log file by calling the real postbuild commands and piping the output to both the cmd window and a log file.

Then in the PostBuild.cmd we have our good old postbuild commands which do the resource compiling, ilmerging, obfuscating, signing or whatever you need :)

Answer 2

It does pretty much the same thing for me. I have a post-build step that consists of ILMerge and then a DOS move command. The ILMerge output is never shown, but the output from move is. I submitted a bug on http://connect.microsoft.com, ID 613727.

Answer 3

I am wondering if using an msbuild <exec> task instead of a post-build event would resolve this issue?

If the <exec> task does not meet your requirements, maybe a custom msbuild task that does something similar to the <exec> task would resolve the issue for example.

Update:
I just tried using <Exec Command="" /> instead of a PostBuild event in my msbuild file but it still kept the Visual Studio IDE busy\unresponsive.

Maybe we can create a custom msbuild task that calls Application.DoEvents to keep the UI responsive?

Update #2: I uploaded a patch to MSBuild Extension Pack that implements a custom msbuild task called SmartExec that works around this issue.

http://msbuildextensionpack.codeplex.com/workitem/9053
http://msbuildextensionpack.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/patches
Patch Id 9878