How to build Visual Studio Installer Project in Azure Pipelines in Self-Hosted Windows Agent

Question

The image above shows my Hello World project structure. I am trying to build the Setup-HelloWorld-x86.vdproj in Azure Pipeline in Self-Hosted Windows Agent (which is nothing but my local machine) by using the command line script task like shown in below image.

But I get the following error.

Kindly help me to build this Setup-HelloWorld-x86.vdproj

Answer 1

If you want to run the project via cmd devenv, you can refer to this doc.

As a workaround, you can install the extension Build VS Installer and use the task DutchWorkz - Build VS Installer(s) to build Visual Studio Installer Project in Azure Pipelines.

You can specify to build .sln or .vdproj to generate .msi file(s) in Task-mode option.

Update1

Thanks Tharunavignesh J for sharing.

The solution was to run the azure agent under proper account. Earlier my azure agent was running under some Network Service account, then I change it to the local account, then this cmd worked properly.

Answer 2

This other stack overflow link helped me get my visual studio installer project compiled with Azure DevOps pipelines. It is using yaml configuration instead of classic, but same steps / commands apply to both:

YAML Script for building Visual Studio Installer Projects using Azure DevOps

Basically the steps are:

• Setup your variables to point to the tools
• Download Nuget packages for your solution
• Disable Out Of Process Builds command executed
• Script task with the command line arguments to build your solution