Quirky psexec behaviour when run from MSBuild.

Part of a deployment process I have been working on requires that our build server deploy some WCF services to a remote host. This is accomplished by hosting the WCF services within a Windows service that listens for TCP connections.

We ran into some quirky behaviour with psexec hanging during the execution of InstallUTil on the remote host. I presume that installutil was prompting for some sort of confirmation and not getting it. I added the -d switch to the psexec command and then noticed that psexec started returning inconsistent exit codes. It turns out that -d causes the PID of the remote process to be returned as the exit code as well as suppressing any interactivity. I can see this being useful in many psexec scenarios but it makes msbuild think something has gone wrong and this means that I also needed to add an IgnoreExitCode attribute to my exec tag like so:

<Exec Command="psexec -d /accepteula \\RemoteHostName C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\InstallUtil.exe /i /LogFile=D:\Logs\ServiceInstallation.log D:\Services\WcfServiceGroupHost.exe" IgnoreExitCode="true" />