Question

The following two paragraphs are background – they just explain why I need to do such a weird thing. If you don’t care you can skip them and go directly to the question.
I’m a Vim user and I started learning C#. Naturally I want to use MSBuild as my makeprg. I want to bind hotkeys for common development operations – Build, Clean and Run. Since I want to set my hotkeys globally, I have a problem as the files’ names are different in each and every project.

In GCC/MinGW this problem could be solved easily – since I’m already storing the important file names in variables, I can simply add to the makefile targets for cleaning the build and running the program, and then bind hotkeys to “:make! Clean” and “:make! Run”. So I figured I could do the same thing with MSBuild targets. It works great for Clean with the Delete tag(not sure I really need clean in .NET, but you know – force of habit), but I have a problem with Run.

Now, this is my problem: unlike GCC/MinGW’s makefiles, which are simply clever batch files that run shell commands, MSBuild uses it’s own set of commands and runs them internally. That means that Exec tasks run the program without a shell – I can open windows, but I can’t use it to test interactive shell programs.

Is there any way to persuade MSBuild to give me an interactive shell?

Answer 1

Have you tried some variation of this,

<Exec Command="start $(COMSPEC) /k &quot;$(PathTo)\My.exe &amp; exit&quot;" />

After escaping it works out to roughly this,

C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe /k "PathTo\My.exe & exit"

Which will run your command within a command shell (/k may not be the right cmd switch for your usage), then when your interactive program exits, it will run the “exit” command and move on.

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