I wanted to run a Post Build Event on Release build only. I have never done a conditional event, but found out that it isn’t that difficult. From what I have found so far there are two ways to accomplish this.

If you defined your Post Build Event in the Project Configuration, Build Event screen in Visual Studio, you can add a conditional if statement to define the condition you want the event to run on.

if $(ConfigurationName) == Release (
copy $(TargetPath) $(SolutionDir)\Plugins\$(TargetFileName)
)

In this example I compare the $(ConfigurationName) property to the text “Release”. You could replace this with the name of the build configuration you want to run your post build script on. A note on build events, they are translated to batch files then ran so you could do anything that you could do in a bat in your event (this is a big assumption as I haven’t ran every command in a build event yet, but I strongly suspect that its safe to assume most cases will be OK).

If you define your build event directly in the Project file you could

<PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == 'Release' ">
    <PostBuildEvent>copy $(TargetPath) $(SolutionDir)\Plugins\$(TargetFileName)</PostBuildEvent>
</PropertyGroup>

If you haven’t used Build Events you should check them out as you can bend your build to your will. You can preprocess files before your build, move files after the build, clean directories…basically anything you can do with a batch file you can do in a Build Event, because it is a batch file.

Reference

Build Events – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ke5z92ks.aspx

Batch Files – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490869.aspx

Build Event Macros – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/42x5kfw4.aspx