Gradle ExecTask and Windows start - visual-studio

Question

This question requires an understanding of both the Window's start command's behavior and a custom gradle ExecTask's handling of it.
Question
Why does start, with an application as a parameter, wait for the application to exit, only when being executed within a gradle ExecTask?
Explanation
From the command line, this works as expected (starts the application and returns, without waiting for the application to exit):
cmd /c myBuildEnvironment.cmd && start "some title for start" devenv.exe my.sln
Pretty simple, it calls a windows batch script to setup the environment and then launches my.sln in Visual Studio. Works just fine, not waiting for Visual Studio to be closed. And, this is what my gradle task is meant to achieve.
The same works "somewhat", using the following gradle ExecTask with start:
/**
* I know that the executable + args is replaced by commandLine. They're
* just there for readability.
*/
task openVsSolution(type: Exec, dependsOn: setupVsSln) {
description 'Opens the VS solution, in the appropriate version of Visual Studio.'
executable 'start'
environment = taskEnv
workingDir '../../src/solution'
args = [vsDevEnv, 'my.sln']
commandLine winCmdPrefix + executable + args
}
Gradle happily reports Build Successful, while Visual Studio remains open.
However, I say "somewhat" because start will actually ignore the executable argument and open my.sln with the default application for it, Microsoft Visual Studio Version Selector. So, after some research, I found that start assumes that the first parameter is the window title, then application, and lastly, the application arguments. So, I tried this:
task openVsSolution(type: Exec, dependsOn: setupVsSln) {
executable 'start'
environment = taskEnv
workingDir '../../src/solution'
args = ['some title for start', vsDevEnv, 'my.sln']
commandLine winCmdPrefix + executable + args
}
Everything works, start used the correct version of Visual Studio's devenv.exe, which varies based on the VC PlatformToolset, but...gradle sits in the background waiting for Visual Studio to close.
Why? How can I achieve all of the desired behavior?
Update
This might be an environmental problem. Apparently, on one dev's machine, the original gradle start task does stay open, as well. So, any invocation of start through gradle waits for it to complete, in a certain environment. The plot thickens...

Answer 1

Gradle is waiting for start to return is my guess, see this post - Run a background job from Gradle. Read also the comment after the answer, this is started from Java so if there is equivalent of & (run in background) for windows, it wouldn't work.
You can also try and wrapping it in a bat file, execute what you want in the bat file in the background then return right away so that gradle would be happy.
Hope this helps.