Best way to make a project with post-build script work on MonoDevelop and Visual Studio?

Question

I have an open source project in which I'm trying to allow development on both MonoDevelop(including *nix) and Visual Studio. One of my recently discovered requirements is I need to copy an outputted file from one directory to another(relative path).

Windows however has the copy command, while *nix has the cp command. What is the best way to get this to work on both platforms and resolve this difference of commands?

Answer 1

You can use the $OS variable to have different post build events depending on the environment. To do this, you must edit the csproj by hand, like:

<PostBuildEvent Condition="'$(OS)' == 'Windows_NT' ">
    dir
</PostBuildEvent>
<PostBuildEvent Condition="'$(OS)' != 'Windows_NT'">
    ls
</PostBuildEvent>

Answer 2

Where possible, if you can lean on built-in MSBuild tasks rather than custom shell scripting, the behavior will generally work on xbuild (and hence MonoDevelop?) without any changes, so no need for platform-specific *proj hacks.

eg:

 <Target Name="AfterBuild">
          <Copy SourceFiles="foo.txt" DestinationFolder="$(OutDir)" />
 </Target>

This is from the mono docs: http://www.mono-project.com/archived/porting_msbuild_projects_to_xbuild/#prepostbuildevents

Answer 3

You could write the post build script in a language like Python. Or you could require other developers to install GnuWin32 CoreUtils as an option to installing CygWin. CoreUtils includes cp. Then you can just unconditionally use cp.