Question

Currently I have a post-build event configured in my web project using Visual Studio 2012 like this:

This basically calls a PowerShell script to add a copyright notice to every .cs file.

What I’d like to do is to execute this powershell script only before Publishing the web app to the remote server. Doing so I won’t experience a delay every time I need to debug the project. Do you know of any way of accomplishing this?

---

According to Sayed’s answer, I customized a specific publish profile and added this:

<PipelineDependsOn>
  CustomBeforePublish;
  $(PipelineDependsOn);
</PipelineDependsOn>
</PropertyGroup>
<Target Name="CustomBeforePublish">
<Message Text="******* CustomBeforePublish *******" Importance="high" />
<Exec Command="powershell.exe -file &quot;$(ProjectDir)\Copyright.ps1&quot;" />
</Target>

Answer 1

It depends on how you define before but below is one technique.

When you create a publish profile with VS2012 it will create you a .pubxml file in the Properties\PublishProfiles folder (My Project\PublishProfiles for VB). These are MSBuild files and you can edit them to customize the publish process. In your case you can inject a target into the publish process, before the publish actually occurs. You can do that by extending the PipelineDependsOn property as below.

<PropertyGroup>
  <PipelineDependsOn>
    CustomBeforePublish;
    $(PipelineDependsOn);
  </PipelineDependsOn>
</PropertyGroup>

<Target Name="CustomBeforePublish">
  <Message Text="********************************** CustomBeforePublish ***********************************" Importance="high"/>
</Target>

FYI regarding the customization of .wpp.targets, that was the only technique which we had for VS2010. My recommendation here is as follows; customize the .pubxml file for most cases and to only create a .wpp.targets file if you want to customize every publish of the given project.