How do I run a program from powershell

Question

I am trying to run a simple command from powershell, but as always with powershell nothing works.

I cannot get this to work regardless how many different quotes I try.

PS> Measure-Command { C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Professional\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe test.sln /Build } 

Answer 1

A command lines such as

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Professional\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe test.sln /Build

wouldn't work in any shell, because, due to the lack of quoting around the executable path, necessitated by that path containing spaces, would result in C:\Program being interpreted as the executable path. In other words: quoting such a path is a must.

What is PowerShell-specific is the need to use &, the call operator whenever an executable path is quoted and/or contains variable references / expressions (which is a purely syntactical requirement explained in this answer; if you don't want to think about when & is required, you may always use it).

Additionally, as you've discovered yourself, for synchronous, console-based operation, you must call devenv.com, not devenv.exe.^[1]

Therefore:

Measure-Command { 
 & 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Professional\Common7\IDE\devenv.com' test.sln /Build 
} 

Note that since the path a literal one (no variable references / expressions), use of single-quoting ('...') is preferable; for more information about string literals in PowerShell, see the bottom section of this answer.

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^{[1] In case you need to invoke a GUI-subsystem application synchronously (wait for it to exit) - which run asynchronously by default - use Start-Process -Wait.}