Event Build pre & post to stop and restart Windows service

Question

I've been experimenting with using build events to start and stop Windows service that are being built in my project. However for the pre & post builds fail with an error level 255. I've tried catching this with the pre-build with no luck.

Pre-build

if "$(ConfigurationName)" == "Debug"
(
 net stop myService
 if errorlevel 2 
    if errorlevel 255 
        :exit

   :exit
)

Post-build

if "$(ConfigurationName)" == "Release"
(
   copy $(TargetDir) C:\Media\Bin\$(ProjectName)
   if errorlevel 1 BuildEventFailed

   :BuildEventFailed
   mkdir C:\Media\Bin\$(ProjectName)

   copy $(TargetDir) C:\Media\Bin\$(ProjectName)
)
else if "$(ConfigurationName)" == "Debug"
(
   net start myService
)

Answer 1

The following weblog by Joel Varty has a solution which I use: Use Build Events to rebuild a Windows Service without having to manually stop/start it

The only problem is when you do a rebuild. Visual Studio cleans up the files before the pre-build event fires. This then off course fails because the service is still running. But regular builds work great. Hope this helps.