Deployment Project Failure Does not Fail Build?

[scott willeke]

I have noticed that when building Visual Studio .NET Solutions containing only “Deployment Projects” if one project fails to build the build step does not fail, and Visual Build reports the build succeeds. Apparently VS.NET still returns 0 as the success code when deployment projects fail?
The log file shows this at the end of the solution build for the step:
---------------------- Done ----------------------
Build: 3 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 skipped

I verified that the “Ignore Fail” checkbox for the step is not checked.

Additionally, in a subsequent step I have a “Copy Files” step that copies the resulting .msi file to another folder. Despite the fact that the source file does not exist and the step does not copy any files (“0 file(s) copied” is recorded in the log), this step does not fail either.

I need the build to fail if either of these steps does not succeed. I thought of adding an additional step using script to check for the existence of the file (something like (if not vbld_FSO.FileExists("mysetup.msi") then Err.Raise…), but I wanted to see if there was a better solution or recommendation first.

Any suggestions on how I can make one or both of these steps cause the build fail?