Publish Visual Studio Project from Command Line

I have been thinking about this for a long time and finally figured it out. In my current project, our visual studio solution has almost 50 projects. As with any other project, we need to publish it daily and deploy it on the Development Server. Being the laziest developer in the team has its own advantages. I was never assigned to give deployment to the server. :-) But looking at my fellow developers publishing 20+ projects, right clicking on each project, checking publish location, waiting for it to publish then moving on to next project; sometimes removing unnecessary files also. It was such a pain to watch them doing this again and again; forget doing it myself.

So I thought, why not try to create a batch file which can do all this stuff automatically with just one click. "MSBuild.exe" was the key to this problem. So, I created a simple batch file with this command.

YOUR\MSBUILD.EXE\LOCATION\msbuild.exe YOUR\PROJECT\LOCATION\ProjectName.csproj

For example :

C:\windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework64\v.4.0.30319\msbuild.exe 

MyProject\Location\ProjectName.csproj /p:Configuration=release;DeployOnBuild:=False;PackageAsSingleFile=True;Platform=ANYCPU;outdir=YOUR\DESTINATION\FOLDER\PATH;

Don't forget to change the folder location while executing the command.
The /p here denotes the properties related to MSBuild.exe. These properties can be configured as per requirement. For me, the most important property is <i>outdir</i>. This property set the location of the folder for Published Folder.

Once you run this command( if there is no build error), you will find the files it location mentioned in 'outdir' folder. So everything is plain and simple. But one thing was not good for me. All the contents were placed inside _PublishedWebsites folder which was not acceptable for me for no reason. :-)
So I wrote one more command XCOPY to copy contents from_PublishedWebsites folder to some other folder to have cleaner output directory.

XCOPY OUTDIR\Location\_PublishedWebsites\* Final\Output\Location /S /Y

Here /S allow us to copy entire folder structure and
 /Y  suppress prompting the confirmation.

Well, everything was set and I gave that my batch file to my fellow colleague. When he executed my batch file into his system, and checked his output folder. Every published folder was empty to my surprise. When I cross checked everything, I found that he has written some Post Build event in his project property. In that, he has used $SolutionDir variable which my batch file was unable to find.

So, I updated my batch file to pass SolutionDir in the property section of MSBuild.exe. Updated version of the batch file looked more like this.

C:\windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework64\v.4.0.30319\msbuild.exe 

MyProject\Location\ProjectName.csproj /p:Configuration=release;DeployOnBuild:=False;PackageAsSingleFile=True;Platform=ANYCPU;outdir=YOUR\DESTINATION\FOLDER\PATH;SolutionDIR=Your\Solution\Folder

With the above changes, I updated the batch file for maintainability by using variables. So final version of the batch file was like this -

@echo off
:: Set Project Location here
SET ProjectLocation="YOUR\PROJECT\LOCATION"

:: Set tempLocation here. This location is used for Publish Location.
SET TempLocation="YOUR\TEMP\LOCATION"

:: Set Final Location here. This location is used for Final Content Location. 
SET FinalLocation="YOUR\FINAL\LOCATION"

:: Set Solution Directory Location here.
SET SolutionDIR="YOUR\SOLUTION\FOLDER"

:: Create if folder do not exist.

IF NOT EXIST %TempLocation% MD %TempLocation%
IF NOT EXIST %FinalLocation% MD %FinalLocation% 

C:\windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework64\v.4.0.30319\msbuild.exe 

%ProjectLocation%\ProjectName.csproj /p:Configuration=Release;DeployOnBuild:=False;PackageAsSingleFile=True;Platform=ANYCPU;outdir=%TempLocation%;SolutionDir=%SolutionDIR% 
 

:: Copy Required files to Final Location
XCOPY %TempLocation%\_PublishedWebsites\* %FinalLocation% /S /Y 

This is how I did it. I know, it can be done using PostBuild event also. I even tried it but for some reason, it didn't worked well for me. I also know that there are some awesome tools which can perform this same task more efficiently. But, I want it do this way only. Any suggestions? 

Override jQuery function for custom behavior (say getter and setter)

A new day and a new, very intelligent idea from the client which he presented to us with great confidence. After we are done with the development of the page, he told us to change the display format of the currency on the change and that to on some of the labels which display amount. So the amount 1000000.00 should look something like 1,000,000.00 in labels. Obviously, we perform some calculation based on these label values. So setting and getting the values for these labels would have been a lot of changes on the script file.

As the changes were for a particular page and the requirement was likely to be change soon ( that's why we say, Experience counts :-) ), I was looking for possible solutions. My initial thought was to create two separate function. One to convert the amount into the desired format and set the value to label. And other one to fetch the value from label, remove the comma and return the numeric value. Problem with this approach was a lot of change in entire code file. There is even chances that i could have missed to call these functions somewhere.

So I thought, why not modify the default text() function of jQuery. That way, I need to write only the extended functions and without even single line of code change in file, I should be able to meet the requirements. So after a bit of efforts, I came up with this code -

<script type="text/javascript">
 
(funtion($) {
        /* Keep original function to execute later. */
        var oldTextFunction = $.fn.text;

        /* Override the jQuery function */
        $.fn.text = function(value) {
            /* Apply this code only to 'span' tags with 'format-amount' class */
            if ($(this).is('span') && $(this).hasClass("format-amount") {
                    /* Setter */
                    if (value) {
                        /* replace orignal amount with formatter amount */
                        value = value.toString().replace(/(\d)(?=(\d\d\d)+(?!\d)/g, "$1,");
                        arguments[0] = value;
                    }
                    /* Getter */
                    else {
                        /* Remove comma from the formatter text. */
                        var formattedText = '';
                        formattedText = jQuery.text(this);
                        if (formattedText) {
                            var find = ',';
                            var regex = new RegExp(find, 'g');
                            formattedText = formattedText.replace(regex, '');
                        }
                        return formattedText;
                    }
                }
                /* Call original function */
                return oldTextFunction.apply(this, arguments);
            };

        })(jQuery);
 
</script> 

That's how, I found the quick fix which is working pretty good till now. Ofcourse, there will be many better solutions to my quick fix. Do tell us how we can implement that.

Extract All sheets inside a folder to individual Excel File

It was supposed to be a peaceful Friday night in office. As I was about to leave the office on time, I was bombed with a very stupid task. Actually, We had some 8-10 files related to some important data and each Excel file contained 10-15 sheets. The task was to extract all those sheets into individual excel file. For me, to do this manually was like digging the well with spoon. It would have taken hours to complete the task. So I thought of trying hands on VBA. It was pretty easy and quick to do this with VBA and within half hour, I was done with my code and task to Extract sheet to files. (Note that I have written the code from scratch. I found below mentioned code segments on some sites and adjusted it to meet my goal.) Lets see how we did that.

First, I tried to extract the excel sheets for the single Excel file.(Please note that i have written this code. Copied it from this location)

Sub Splitbook()

Dim xPath As String

'Pick current excel path
xPath = Application.ActiveWorkbook.Path

Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Application.DisplayAlerts = False

'Loop through all sheets
For Each xWs In ThisWorkbook.Sheets
    xWs.Copy
    
    'Save excel file with sheet name
    Application.ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs Filename:=xPath & "\" & xWs.Name & ".xlsx"
    Application.ActiveWorkbook.Close False
Next

Application.DisplayAlerts = True
Application.ScreenUpdating = True

End Sub

Well, that works pretty straight. It extracted all the sheets into files(naming sheet name as file name) Now, the next challenge was to loop through all the files in a folder, process each file and loop through its sheets. For that, I created a new Macro-supported file (.xlsm) file. Pressed [Alt] + [F11]. This opens up the code window. In that, go to Menu -> Insert -> Module and pasted these lines -

Sub SplitAllBook()

Dim fso As Object
Dim xPath As String
Dim wbk As Workbook
Dim Filename As String

Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Application.DisplayAlerts = False

xPath = "YOUR_SOURCE_FOLDER_NAME_HERE"

'Pick only ".xlsx" files. In case you want to process older version of files, please change the extension to .xls
Filename = Dir(xPath & "*.xlsx")

'Loop through all files
Do While Len(Filename) > 0  'IF NEXT FILE EXISTS THEN

    Set wbk = Workbooks.Open(Filename:=xPath & Filename)

    'Use fso to remove the extension from file name. We used this name to Name excel file.
    Set fso = CreateObject("scripting.filesystemobject")
    Dim tempFileName As String
    tempFileName = fso.GetBaseName(Filename)
    
    'Loop through all sheets
    For Each xWs In wbk.Sheets

        xWs.Copy
        'I have used naming convention as - OriginalFileName_SheetName.xlsx to avoid name conflict. You can put any logic you want.
        Application.ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs Filename:="YOUR_DESTINATION_FOLDER_NAME_HERE\" & tempFileName & "_" & xWs.Name & ".xlsx"
        Application.ActiveWorkbook.Close False

    Next

    wbk.Close True
    Filename = Dir

Loop

Application.DisplayAlerts = True
Application.ScreenUpdating = True

End Sub

With that, we are done. Run you macro and you should get all the sheets created as new excel files in the destination folder.

Tip -
 
I faced a couple of problems while running the code.
1. Unique Name for files - Figure out a way to provide a unique name to your file or else the macro will throw the error.

2. Folder Path - Define your folder path correctly with all the "\" etc wherever required. In case a problem occurs, a quick debug will solve it easily.

Sample Code

Thank you.