Developers command prompt in Azure DevOps

Question

We have a team Foundation Server setup on premise. This is Azure-devops but a local setup.

We have the ASP.Net code. The code base doesn't have a .sln file or a .csproj file for the MSBuild. To build the code Dev team runs Below command from developers command prompt for VS2017

aspnet_compiler -p "E:\project\Release\netCompile" -v / E:\project\Release\netdeploy -f

I cannot run this command from the command line as it is throwing an error saying aspnet_compiler is not recognized as an internal command.

I tried to use the following command in command line to open the developers command prompt, followed by the aspnet_compiler command.

script: '%comspec% /k ""C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat"" amd64_x86'

This seems to work fine but then again the aspnet_compiler command exit with code 1.

Can I know how can I achieve this task in Azure DevOps

Answer 1

- task: CmdLine@2
  inputs:
    script: 'echo call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\BuildTools\Common7\Tools\VsDevCmd.bat"
             > deploy_app_test.bat

      echo aspnet_compiler -p "./" -v / ../build -f >> deploy_app_test.bat

      echo aspnet_merge ../build  -a -o app -xmldocs  >> deploy_app_test.bat'


- task: BatchScript@1
  inputs:
    filename: "deploy_app_test.bat"
    arguments: 

I was able to bypass this by creating a batch file with Dev Command Prompt and running it through command line.

Answer 2

You can run VsDevCmd.bat with "modifyEnvironment" set to true.

- task: BatchScript@1
  inputs:
    filename: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Enterprise\Common7\Tools\VsDevCmd.bat'
    arguments: '-arch=amd64'
    modifyEnvironment: true
  displayName: "Initialize Visual Studio Environment"

- script: # something that runs in the developer command prompt