Now that’s what I call customer service! :-) I wish I’d found a better ‘net search term and had been able to pick up this aspect of the msbuild command before posting irately… Should I assume, then, that “x error y: z” will always trigger this behaviour? Also – is the full regex documented anywhere online? I couldn’t quite be sure I understood the diagram on your blog.

One further question – I am sure that while you were implementing this feature, you spent time deciding how to balance the Exec invocation’s returned error number against the apparent errors noted through matches to this regex – that is, whether a tool that returned 0, theoretically signalling success, but also printed out what appeared to be an error message, should be regarded to have failed or not. I come from a Unix-y background, and it seems wrong to me to not have the zero error code, meaning no error, “trump” what appears to be an error message. Obviously you and your team feel differently; I’d be very interested in knowing what the considerations that pointed you in that direction where. Have you posted – or do you intend to post – anything along those lines?

Regards,

Giles

While this comes in handy to populate the error list in Visual Studio, that is not the primary reason – many tools use this error format today.

In order to help you solve the issue, we are goin to make the “regex” used for specifying error formats extensible so that you can specify your own regular expression that can indicate what error format the Exec invocation should actually consider as an error. We hope for this feature to be available in Visual Studio / MSBuild Orcas.

Thanks.
Faisal Mohamood | Program Manager | Visual Studio