How to troubleshoot a 'System.Management.Automation.CmdletInvocationException'

Posted by JamesD on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by JamesD
Published on 2010-04-14T09:20:55Z Indexed on 2010/04/14 9:23 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 791

Does anyone know how best to determine the specific underlying cause of this exception?

Consider a WCF service that is supposed to use Powershell 2.0 remoting to execute MSBuild on remote machines. In both cases the scripting environments are being called in-process (via C# for Powershell and via Powershell for MSBuild), rather than 'shelling-out' - this was a specific design decision to avoid command-line hell as well as to enable passing actual objects into the Powershell script.

The Powershell script that calls MSBuild is shown below:

function Run-MSBuild
{
    [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.Build.Engine")

    $engine = New-Object Microsoft.Build.BuildEngine.Engine
    $engine.BinPath = "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5"

    $project = New-Object Microsoft.Build.BuildEngine.Project($engine, "3.5")
    $project.Load("deploy.targets")
    $project.InitialTargets = "DoStuff"

    #
    # Set some initial Properties & Items
    #

    # Optionally setup some loggers (have also tried it without any loggers)
    $consoleLogger = New-Object Microsoft.Build.BuildEngine.ConsoleLogger
    $engine.RegisterLogger($consoleLogger)

    $fileLogger = New-Object Microsoft.Build.BuildEngine.FileLogger
    $fileLogger.Parameters = "verbosity=diagnostic"
    $engine.RegisterLogger($fileLogger)


    # Run the build - this is the line that throws a CmdletInvocationException
    $result = $project.Build()

    $engine.Shutdown()
}

When running the above script from a PS command prompt it all works fine. However, as soon as the script is executed from C# it fails with the above exception.

The C# code being used to call Powershell is shown below (remoting functionality removed for simplicity's sake):

// Build the DTO object that will be passed to Powershell
dto = SetupDTO()

RunspaceConfiguration runspaceConfig = RunspaceConfiguration.Create();
using (Runspace runspace = RunspaceFactory.CreateRunspace(runspaceConfig))
{
    runspace.Open();

    IList errors;
    using (var scriptInvoker = new RunspaceInvoke(runspace))
    {
        // The Powershell script lives in a file that gets compiled as an embedded resource
        TextReader tr = new StreamReader(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetManifestResourceStream("MyScriptResource"));
        string script = tr.ReadToEnd();

        // Load the script into the Runspace
        scriptInvoker.Invoke(script);

        // Call the function defined in the script, passing the DTO as an input object
        var psResults = scriptInvoker.Invoke("$input | Run-MSBuild", dto, out errors);
    }
}

Assuming that the issue was related to MSBuild outputting something that the Powershell runspace can't cope with, I have also tried the following variations to the second .Invoke() call:

var psResults = scriptInvoker.Invoke("$input | Run-MSBuild | Out-String", dto, out errors);
var psResults = scriptInvoker.Invoke("$input | Run-MSBuild | Out-Null", dto, out errors);
var psResults = scriptInvoker.Invoke("Run-MSBuild | Out-String");
var psResults = scriptInvoker.Invoke("Run-MSBuild | Out-String");
var psResults = scriptInvoker.Invoke("Run-MSBuild | Out-Null");

I've also looked at using a custom PSHost (based on this sample: http://blogs.msdn.com/daiken/archive/2007/06/22/hosting-windows-powershell-sample-code.aspx), but during debugging I was unable to see any 'interesting' calls to it being made.

Do the great and the good of Stackoverflow have any insight that might save my sanity?

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