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?