Saturday, October 05, 2013

PowerShell 3 Start-Process MSBuild.exe -Wait hang

Having recently upgraded a Win7 machine that I had previously been using to check PoSh 2 compatibility (and had forgotten was not upgraded) to PoSh3, a build script launched from a PoSh prompt that did Start-Process MSBuild.exe -Wait -PassThru - ArgumentList ... started hanging on the wait more often than not, with Process Explorer showing the MSBuildTaskHost executable still lingering outside of the PowerShell process tree.

Killing that MSBuildTaskHost process usually unwedged the process, so it could go on to do the post build analyses in the rest of the script. Running with DISABLEOUTOFPROCTASKHOST=1 to avoid the separate process was worse -- there was no process around to kill and maybe release the PowerShell session when it hung.

Replacing the cmlet with a direct invocation & MSBuild.exe ..., and using $LastExitCode rather than the process object ExitCode property value seems to avoid the hang so far.

I don't know whether it's just MSBuild that's affected by this hang on wait, but I've not seen this behaviour elsewhere yet.

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