Control Visual Studio 2017 from command line/package manager/powershell

Question

I am aware of the PowerShell object $dte , but I am wondering if their are other possibilities to control actions like Rebuild Solution , Clean Solution etc?

As my PowerShell prompt ist opened anyway all the time (using Posh-Git, .etc) it would be handy to control other Visual Studio Tasks straight from the PS console.

Answer 1

The DTE documentation for SolutionBuild has some VB code that was pretty easy to translate to Powershell:

$dte = [System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::GetActiveObject('VisualStudio.DTE')
$sb = $dte.Solution.SolutionBuild
$sb.SolutionConfigurations['Debug'].Activate  #Or maybe you want 'Release'
$sb.Build() 

The SolutionBuild interface has other interesting methods: Clean() , Debug() and Run() . You were probably already aware, but the console needs to be running as Administrator to get the DTE handle.