Swallowing errors in pre-build steps in Visual Studio 2010

Question

My solution has a bunch of projects one of which is a windows service; I have a prebuild step to stop the service and a postbuild step to restart it (this way the windows service exe is not locked when VS is building/overwriting it).

on pre-build: 
net stop myservice

on post-build:
net start myservice

If the service is not running while I'm starting the build, the net stop command fails and that prevents the build from proceeding.

What can I do to still force the build even if the pre-build step failed?

Answer 1

I figured it out - you simply need to add the following statement at the end:

SET ERRORLEVEL = 0

or simply:

EXIT 0

Answer 2

I know this is an old post, but I recently had this issue as well. I wanted to kill the process that I was building if it was currently running, and found that I could do:

taskkill /f /im $(TargetName).exe 2>nul 1>nul
Exit 0

2>nul 1>nul without Exit 0 , or vice versa, doesn't seem to work. I have to do both.

Also worth noting this is using Visual Studio Express 2012.

I found the solution when looking into this issue as well on this blog

The 2>nul 1>nul will swallow the stderr and stdout from the command. The EXIT 0 will make sure the build event returns 0.

Answer 3

There is no need to redirrect stdout, just stderr. Also, set errorlevel allows you to have extra lines later if you need. Exit will terminate immediately.

taskkill /f /im:$(TargetFileName) 2>nul &set errorlevel=0

Works in VS 2017.

Answer 4

Wrap your net commands in a batch file and use exit /B 0

http://ss64.com/nt/exit.html

Answer 5

Would embedding the command in an executable that always returns 0 solve your issue?

in c call

system("net stop myservice")