Build Solutions and Projects With PowerShell

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As we all know Visual Studio is an amazing IDE. It’s crazy powerful, has an enormous feature set, and makes developers lives better. However, one area where using Visual Studio can sometimes be a drag is when you just want to do a quick build of your solution or project. Depending on how large your code base is and what your build steps look like, it can take up to several minutes to complete or Visual Studio may even crash on you. This gets old really quick, especially if the whole IDE doesn’t need to be open with all its bells and whistles to do what you are wanting to accomplish. For example, I often want to do a build after pulling from GitHub just to make sure everything is okay before pushing my local commits. Some very simple PowerShell can help us out here!

Overview

Visual Studio’s build functionality is built (pun intended) on top of MSBuild.exe (see the documentation), which it calls out to with various parameters to get it’s work done. We can use this same executable in PowerShell to perform your own builds. We will create a simple PowerShell function to build a solution or project using MSBuild.exe and even perform NuGet package restores.

Install NuGet CLI

Go ahead and install the NuGet CLI (command line interface). See the ‘Installing’ section of the NuGet documentation for instructions on how to get it set up. It is really easy and there are a number of different ways to do it.

Setup & Understand the PowerShell Function

Now let’s grab a look at the PowerShell function:

function buildVS
{
    param
    (
        [parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
        [String] $path,

        [parameter(Mandatory=$false)]
        [bool] $nuget = $true,
        
        [parameter(Mandatory=$false)]
        [bool] $clean = $true
    )
    process
    {
        $msBuildExe = 'C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\Bin\msbuild.exe'

        if ($nuget) {
            Write-Host "Restoring NuGet packages" -foregroundcolor green
            nuget restore "$($path)"
        }

        if ($clean) {
            Write-Host "Cleaning $($path)" -foregroundcolor green
            & "$($msBuildExe)" "$($path)" /t:Clean /m
        }

        Write-Host "Building $($path)" -foregroundcolor green
        & "$($msBuildExe)" "$($path)" /t:Build /m
    }
}

Pretty simple right? We declare a variable named $msBuildExe and set it equal to the full file path of where Visual Studio installs the MSBuild.exe (by default). The buildVS function takes three parameters:

But how do you call it? First, add the buildVS function to your PowerShell profile. If you do not already have a PowerShell profile then follow these steps:

  1. Open a PowerShell console
  2. Run $PROFILE
  3. Create the file echoed back by the $PROFILE command
  4. Paste the buildVS function (above) into this new file
  5. Run . $PROFILE to load the profile (or just close and re-open the PowerShell console)

Use the PowerShell Function

Now you should be able to use the function in your PowerShell console from anywhere. Here are a few examples of calling the function:

# nuget restore, clean solution, and build solution
buildVS .\path\to\solution.sln

# clean solution and build solution
buildVS .\path\to\solution.sln $false $true

# build solution
buildVS -path .\path\to\solution.sln -nuget $false -clean $false

# nuget restore and build solution
buildVS -path .\path\to\solution.sln -clean $false

# etc.

When you execute the function you will see a bunch of output from MSBuild.exe, and if any errors are encountered they will be in red. At the end of the build step there will be a summary with any warnings or errors that occurred during the build.

I use this function throughout my work day and it makes me much more productive. I no longer need to open Visual Studio, wait for my solution to load, clean, build, etc. I just execute the buildVS function and I am done.