How to upgrade a Visual Studio project from within a GitHub action? - visual-studio

Question

A Visual Studio project can be upgraded from the command line using the devenv.exe command as follows:
devenv.exe SOLUTION_PATH /Upgrade
Where SOLUTION_PATH is a path to a Visual Studio solution (or project) file.
What is the most direct way to perform this step as part of a GitHub action?
What I Have Tried
So far I have failed to find a way to get devenv.exe into the path of the GitHub Action. There does not appear to be a prebuilt action step for this (setup-msbuild step does not make devenv available). Even hardcoding a path such as
MSDEVENV_PATH: ${{'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Enterprise\Common7\IDE\devenv.com'}}
... then later ...
run: ${{env.MSDEVENV_PATH}} ${{env.SOLUTION_FILE_PATH}} /Upgrade
fails because the path contains spaces, and I can find no way to add quotation marks.
I am aware of a way to find devenv using powershell and extra downloadable packages however this will require writing a PowerShell script, and presumably signing it, and I have no idea whether this will even work in a GitHub Action. Perhaps there is a much simpler approach, hence my question: what is the most direct way to upgrade a solution?

Answer 1

You need a Windows-based runner. vswhere is the tool to get path to various components of the Visual Studio installation and its folder is in the path (source).
run: |
$devenv = & vswhere.exe '-property' productPath
Start-Process -FilePath $devenv -ArgumentList '${{env.SOLUTION_FILE_PATH}} /Upgrade' -Wait

Answer 2

Thanks to #riQQ's partial answer I currently have the following, which waits for the output to be done using both a pipe to Out-Null suggested in this answer and also waits for the generated files to appear. Note that I am using a path to the project not to the solution. (I could not get solution upgrading to work correctly, although I never worked out why.)
run: |
$devenv = & vswhere.exe '-property' productPath
Write-Output "$devenv"
& $devenv "${{env.VCPROJ_FILE_PATH}}" /Upgrade /NoSplash | Out-Null
Write-Output "devenv launched"
while (!(Test-Path "${{env.VCXPROJ_FILE_PATH}}")) { Start-Sleep -Seconds 10 }
Write-Output "vcxproj found"
while (!(Test-Path "${{env.VCXPROJ_FILTERS_FILE_PATH}}")) { Start-Sleep -Seconds 10 }
Write-Output "vcxproj.filters found"
Start-Sleep -Seconds 10
Write-Output "done."
For some reason this step is taking over 5 minutes to complete when run as part of a GitHub Action. It takes only a few seconds on my local machine. Because of the nasty file polling I don't consider this an ideal solution, but I am posting it here for reference.