Visual Studio 2012 Command Line Building - Detecting Build Failures

Question

I'm setting up a build server for a Visual Studio 2012 project and I'm trying to add detection for failed builds so the server can properly recover after a build failure and notify users of the failure and the error message.

I'm using devenv.exe with the "/Build" and "/Out" switches, however for building, the "/Out" switch captures all build output and stores in the specified file, and I only want it to capture build errors.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can only have build errors written to the file, or better ways of detecting a build failure?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

If you just need a pass/fail, you could use ERRORLEVEL in a batch/cmd script. It's primitive, but would probably work for most cases. Something like this:

@devenv Solution.sln /Build
@if ERRORLEVEL 1 echo Build Failed

You could also use MSBuild, which has options for console output (i.e. /clp:ErrorsOnly) as well as file output. Something like this:

msbuild /p:Configuration=Debug /t:Rebuild /clp:ErrorsOnly Solution.sln