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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T17:53:34+00:00

I just recently upgraded from VS2008 to VS2010. Because I do a lot of

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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

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    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

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