Question

I would like either a command prompt solution or a Visual Studio 2008 solution for the following:

I am building a solution in Visual Studio 2008 C# and I need to test it.

In order to test the solution, I need to copy it to a different machine.

My process is:

1. copy debug folder to shared location
2. copy from the shared location onto the source machine

I try to do it like this:

rmdir s:\debug /s /q
s:
md debug
copy "C:\Documents and Settings\user123\Desktop\eFormsSystem\eFormsApp\bin\Debug\*.*" s:\debug\

however it is saying that THE SYSTEM CANNOT FIND THE PATH SPECIFIED.

I am certain there is a problem with the code above; however I would like to know:

1. Is there a way to do this using Visual Studio? I would want it to copy the debug directory into a shared location as soon as there is a build.
2. If command prompt is better suited for this, can you please tell me what is wrong with my code above?

Answer 1

There are two things you can try. First is try using the switches on the copy command like you did for the rmdir command. Try adding the /Y and /Z switches.

• /Y = Suppresses prompting to confirm you want to overwrite an
  existing destination file.
• /Z = Copies networked files in restartable mode.

May just want to try this first. I know the /Y is redundant since you are removing the destination directory before copying.

copy "C:\Documents and Settings\user123\Desktop\eFormsSystem\eFormsApp\bin\Debug\*.*" s:\debug\ /Z /Y

Secondly, you asked if you could do this from Visual Studio. You could use the post-build event on the project to copy files to another location on the network after a successful build. However, you first need to get the command working.