Hello!

So, recently at work I have been working on automating SSIS Builds using DevEnv, but called through MSBuild. Fortunately I wrote a blog post about this on another blog a long time ago, so was able to retrieve the info easily enough.

Trouble is, the sample code I had on the script had some formatting issues. See all those $quot; entities? You see sometimes, double quotes are formatted as the html " entity. Through the WordPress platform anyway, It’s a bit of a pain in that people will have to reformat the code, and makes the demos look shabby.

You can see it below.

And so it needed to be updated before I could save and run on my machine. Trouble is I was getting this error:

C:\ssis\BuildSsis.proj(14,12): error MSB4025: The project file could not be loaded. Name cannot begin with the '$' character, hexadecimal value 0x24. Line 14, position 12.

To quote the French: quoi? What was going on?

Cut forward to an hour when I checked double quote escape characters in the Exec Task for MSBuild. the escape character in the Command parameter is….. " . So it turns out my blog post was not poorly formatted, but moreover I omitted to mention that this was required in the command parameter for it to work.

All this amounts to the question “How much is too much information in a blog post?”

When I started blogging, I wanted to leave no one behind, and so would write blog posts for an audience of people who had very little experience/understanding of the subject. Round about 3 years after blogging like this I decided against this method as I took far too long to write blog posts. But as this post demonstrates, there is a difference between assuming some prior knowledge, and forgetting to mention something pretty important!