Post-publish action for VSTO add-in with IAddInPostDeploymentAction class? - visual-studio

Question

I have a document-level customisation associated with an excel template (.xlt) application. The solution includes a postAction class that drops a copy of the template in the default location for excel User Templates (Application.TemplatesPath).
There is a manual process that needs to be done, post publishing, in order to make this work, which I have automated in a powershell script.
After I publish the solution...
I want to run the script to integrate the postAction and re-sign the manifests.
Is there any way to do this?

Answer 1

I figured it out eventually.
First I had to understand the configuration splatter around MSBuild...
Configuration splatter
The .csproj file pulls together the configuration XML that drives MSBuild.
This includes things called Targets which are executable chunks of buildness
Targets are not executed in the order they are parsed. In fact they are not executed at all unless they are somehow tied to the Predefined Targets of MSBuild.
Targets are tied to the build process using their AfterTargets, BeforeTargets and DependsOnTargets optional attributes.
There are loads of predefined values available, including Targets environment variables and key filenames and paths, which are oozing out of the config splatter.
The csproj file has Import elements that bring in a lot of predefined elements and metadata from system .target and .props files.
You can make your own .target files and import them as well. They have the same execution context as the importing file.
There is a special Targets file that takes care of the VSTO build and publishing process: $(VSToolsPath)\OfficeTools\Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Office.targets and you can see the publishing Targets in there.
The Target that I need is BeforePublish. If I turn up the build output to "detailed" I can see that the only thing happening after this point is that the distribution files are moved around from a temp, build location and then to the publishing folder. Along the way, the manifests are updated to reflect changes to the paths before being re-signed. So I chained my custom post-publish Target off of that via it's AfterTargets attribute and took advantage of the convenience of the temp build location inside the project directory structure.
In my command line version of the post-action I operated in the publishing folder location so I adjusted it to find the files in the temp location.
Final steps of the publish build
To take a look around, I added this markup at the end of the .csproj file (inside the Project tag).
<Target Name="AfterPublish">
<Message Text="After Publish >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>" />
</Target>
<Target Name="DisplayMessages" AfterTargets="PublishOnly">
<Message Text="After PublishOnly in project.csproj>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>" />
</Target>
And this is the end of the build output...
1>Task "SignFile"
1>Done executing task "SignFile".
1>Done building target "CreateBootstrapper" in project "WeekEndingTabs.csproj".
1>Target "AfterPublish" in project "<MSBuildProjectFullPath>\project.csproj" (target "PublishOnly" depends on it):
1>Task "Message"
1> After Publish >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
1>Done executing task "Message".
1>Done building target "AfterPublish" in project "project.csproj".
1>Target "PublishOnly" in file "<path to Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Office.targets>" from project "path to project.csproj" (entry point):
1>Done building target "PublishOnly" in project "project.csproj".
1>Target "DisplayMessages" in project "path to project.csproj" (entry point):
1>Task "Message"
1> After PublishOnly >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
1>Done executing task "Message".
1>Done building target "DisplayMessages" in project "project.csproj".
1>
1>Build succeeded.
Custom tasks (faked with PowerShell script)
In order to invoke my post-publish script, I first created a custom .targets file called postAction.targets and put this in it...
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="Windows-1252"?>
<Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
<Target Name="EstablishLogDir" Condition="!Exists('$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\Logs')">
<MakeDir Directories=".\Logs"/>
</Target>
<Target Name="AddPostAction" AfterTargets="PublishOnly" DependsOnTargets="EstablishLogDir">
<PropertyGroup>
<PowerShellExe Condition=" '$(PowerShellExe)'=='' ">%WINDIR%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe</PowerShellExe>
<ScriptLocation Condition=" '$(ScriptLocation)'=='' ">C:\Users\Admin\Documents\GitHub\powershell-scripts\postAction-MSBuild.ps1</ScriptLocation>
<Switches>-NonInteractive -executionpolicy Unrestricted</Switches>
<PostAction>FileCopyPDA.FileCopyPDA</PostAction>
<Arguments>"& { &&apos;$(ScriptLocation)&apos; &apos;$(PostAction)&apos; $(Configuration)} "</Arguments>
<LogFile >PostAction.log</LogFile>
<LogFile Condition="Exists('$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\Logs')">.\Logs\$(LogFile)</LogFile>
</PropertyGroup>
<Exec Command="$(PowerShellExe) $(Switches) -command $(Arguments) > $(LogFile)" />
</Target>
</Project>
(I pipe it to a log file in a subdirectory of the project)
Then I added an import element into the .csproj file
<Import Project="$(MSBuildToolsPath)\Microsoft.CSharp.targets" />
<Import Project="$(VSToolsPath)\OfficeTools\Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Office.targets" Condition="'$(VSToolsPath)' != ''" />
<Import Project=".\OfficeTools\PostAction.targets" />
I put it in the same place as the other Import elements, it doesn't work if I just tack it on at the end.
And that's it. Now my post-publish script runs at the end of every Publish build I do and the postsAction section is added to the application manifest of the current version and it and the deploy manifest are re-signed with the correct certificate.