Question

I am trying all kinds of variants of the following command:

powershell -command "'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\vc\vcvarsall.bat' x86" -noexit

I am hoping to run Powershell with the VS environment vars – to no avail. I just cannot get the quotes right.

Answer 1

Have a look at the PowerShell Community Extensions. It comes with a command to invoke a batch file, “remember” what env vars it set and bring those into your PowerShell session. In fact, my profile does just this with the VS vars e.g.:

Import-Module Pscx

function Import-VS9Vars
{
    $vcargs = ?: {$Pscx:Is64BitProcess} {'amd64'} {'x86'}
    Push-EnvironmentBlock -Description "Before importing VS 2008 $vcargs var"
    Invoke-BatchFile "${env:VS90COMNTOOLS}..\..\VC\vcvarsall.bat" $vcargs
}

function Import-VS10Vars
{
    $vcargs = ?: {$Pscx:Is64BitProcess} {'amd64'} {'x86'}
    Push-EnvironmentBlock -Description "Before importing VS 2010 $vcargs vars"
    Invoke-BatchFile "${env:VS100COMNTOOLS}..\..\VC\vcvarsall.bat" $vcargs
}

Import-VS10Vars

The important command is the Invoke-BatchFile. The source to this function comes in the download so if you don’t want to use the whole module, you can copy out just that one function if you’d like.