vscode building of Visual Studio Projects

Question

I am trying to build a collection of .vcxproj generated by Premake within VS Code. What I don't get is why it works for executing the premake generation but not the .vcxproj builds as the old batch files are the same except they call msbuild.exe with a full path.

---

---

** Visual Studio 2019 Developer Command Prompt v16.11.17 ** Copyright (c) 2021 Microsoft Corporation

---

Building configurations... Running action 'vs2019'... Done (160ms).

• Terminal will be reused by tasks, press any key to close it.

• Executing task: msbuild.exe SimClient.vcxproj && "/p:configuration=Debug Static" && /p:platform=x64

'C:/Program' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

• The terminal process "cmd.exe /C "C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/2019/Community/Common7/Tools/VsDevCmd.bat" && msbuild.exe SimClient.vcxproj && "/p:configuration=Debug Static" && /p:platform=x64" terminated with exit code: 1.
• Terminal will be reused by tasks, press any key to close it.

---

This is my tasks.json there is more but it's just rinse and repeat.

{
    "version": "2.0.0",
    "windows": {
        "options": {
          "shell": {
            "executable": "cmd.exe",
            "args": [
                "/C",
                // The path to VsDevCmd.bat depends on the version of Visual Studio you have installed.
                "\"C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/2019/Community/Common7/Tools/VsDevCmd.bat\"",
                "&&"
            ]
          }
        }
      },
    "tasks": [
        {
            "type": "shell",
            "label": "Generate Project",
            "command": "${workspaceFolder}/packages/premake/premake5.exe",
            "args": [ "vs2019" ],
            "group": {
                "kind": "build",
                "isDefault": true
            },
        },
        {
            "type": "shell",
            "label": "Build SimClient (Debug)",
            "dependsOn": ["Generate Project"],
            "command": "msbuild.exe" ,
            "args": [
                "SimClient.vcxproj",
                "&&",
                "/p:configuration=Debug Static",
                "&&",
                "/p:platform=x64"
            ],
            "problemMatcher": [ "$msCompile" ],
            "group": {
                "kind": "build",
                "isDefault": true
            },
        },
        ...
        ],
    }
}

Answer 1

I managed to find a solution to this problem while trying to start a process in an external terminal. By replacing "command":"msbuild.exe" with "command":"cmd.exe" and moving the "msbuild.exe" into the argument list preceded by "/C" fixes the failing path string.

{
    "version": "2.0.0",
    "windows": {
        "options": {
          "shell": {
            "executable": "cmd.exe",
            "args": [
                "/C",
                "\"C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/2019/Community/Common7/Tools/VsDevCmd.bat\"",
                "&&"
            ]
          }
        }
      },
    "tasks": [
        {
            "label": "Generate Project",
            "type": "shell",
            "command": "${workspaceFolder}/packages/premake/premake5.exe",
            "args": [ "vs2019" ],
            "group": {
                "kind": "build",
                "isDefault": false
            },
        },
        {
            "type":"shell",
            "label": "Build (Debug)",
            "command":"cmd.exe",
            "args": [
                "/C",
                "msbuild.exe",
                "SimClient.sln",
                "/p:configuration=Debug;platform=x64"
            ],
            "problemMatcher": [ "$msCompile" ],
            "group": {
                "kind": "build",
                "isDefault": false
            },
        },

    ]
}