Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 4, Customizing Visual Studio

#34 Customize Your Project Build Process

HACK

In the Build Events tab, choose to run a Post-Build event when a successful

build occurs and add a Post-Build event command line of:

copy "$(ProjectDir)EndUser.config" "$(TargetDir)"

Note the use of quotes around the variables and commands—the quotes are

there because there may be spaces in the file and pathnames. Also, the vari-

ables that generate pathnames will append an ending slash automatically.

After a successful build of this project the current version of the EndUser.

config file in the project directory will be copied to the output directory.

Copying files after a build is just one example of how these build events can

be useful. More complex operations can be performed as well. For example,

a Windows script or executable could be run when a build completes to kick

off a set of test scripts against the newly built output. The build event could

just as easily automatically create and register an output type library for use

with COM or even register a newly built component with the GAC.

Pre- and post-build commands are available only to nonweb C# applica-

tions in Visual Studio .NET 2003, but they are also available to nonweb

Visual Basic .NET applications in Visual Studio 2005.

Handling Build Events

Some of the limitations of the custom pre- and post-build command events

are that they are available for