Powershell scripts running on Bamboo don’t return the correct exit code

As part of an deployment project on Bamboo CI, I was running a powershell script to deploy an ASP.NET application to a Cloud Service on Azure.

Even though there was an error executing the script, Bamboo was setting the status of the Deployment to Success. Why? Because the exit code returned by the powershell script is always 0 (zero means successful execution).

After some research I was able to find a way to return the correct exit code in case of failure. I added the following lines to the top of my powershell script:

trap
{
    write-output $_
    exit 1
}

The trap statement includes a list of statements to run when a terminating error occurs – in this case, every time an error occurs the error message will be displayed and then the script will return a correct exit code indicating a failure. I am returning 1 but any value different from 0 (zero) will do the trick 🙂

Using build events to create nuget packages

In this post I’ll show you how to automate the creation of nuget packages using Build Events in Visual Studio.

Table of contents

• The problem
• The solution
  1. Download nuget.exe
  2. Generate the .nuspec file for the project
  3. Edit the AssemblyInfo.cs file
  4. Add a Post-Build Event to create the package and build the solution
  5. Confirm that the package was created correctly
• Final thoughts
• References

The Problem

You want to create a nuget package for a class library in order to use it in different applications. You want to execute this task every time you build the project/solution.

The solution

In short, you need to create a .nuspec file for the project and then use a Post-Build Event Command Line to create the package.

For demonstration purposes I created a small class library project that contains my XmlSerializer class. I’ll show you step by step how to create a nuget package for that project.