Visual Studio 2010 hangs when executng post-build events

Question

Why Visual Studio 2010 hangs when it executes post-build events? It seems that it is doing them on gui thread. Because of that now i'm placed all instructions in .cmd file so I at least I can see output in realtime and not after build completes. It's supposed to work that way or i'm doing something wrong?

upd: If I place notepad.exe into post-build events then Visual Studio will become unresponsive to any user input (and after some time 'Visual Studio is busy' popup appears) until I close notepad. The question is how to make VS responsive (so I can at least click 'output' tab) while notepad is running.

Answer 1

Postbuild events have to work for your compilation to succeed. Meaning, even if the event is some non project related mechanism that you've thrown in, if it fails, your compilation will fail. As an example, when building Media Center applications, the standard process is to include a dll that the SDK thinks is in on your system, but in fact has been gone since Vista, so, if you leave the post build event in, you can't even compile your code.