Display appropriate error message when providing syntactically incorrect MSBUILD flags to dotnet pack

[Matheos96]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

This had me baffled for a while. Basically I was trying to package a nuget package using dotnet pack by replicating what we do in our CI/CD pipeline. I did not copy the commands correctly, so when running the dotnet pack command I had a small syntactical error in providing the MsBuild PackageVersion property... See it?

I did not see anything wrong with this for quite some time. Obviously it should be -p:PackageVersion=8.0.0.0 with an equals sign, not a semi-colon. I noticed it when I actually copied the command straight off but I had the faulty one in my CLI history and could not figure out why it would be there if not working...

The dotnet pack output tells me close to nothing. I even tried running it with -v diag verbosity to see EVERYTHING but that still did not indicate anything what could have gone wrong...

Describe the solution you'd like

Please consider adopting some syntactical checking for these -p:PropertyName=Value flags. At the very least tell me that something went wrong, even if I would not know what. There is no error, no red text, nothing. Only through experience I knew I expected more of an output (and of course the .nupkg itself). The console output in no way indicates an error has occurred.

Additional context

I realise it may be a challenge to get a very friendly syntax related error message done, probably due to how the command is parsed? I would like to see something though, even just red text saying it failed. Imagine this being in a pipeline and you quickly go through everything trying to figure out why your package has not been published. There is no blatant error anywhere

[dotnet-issue-labeler]

I couldn't figure out the best area label to add to this issue. If you have write-permissions please help me learn by adding exactly one area label.

[Forgind]

@Matheos96,

Thanks for filing this! I actually caught an almost identical bug a while ago. Can you clarify what version of the SDK/MSBuild you're using? I believe this should be 90% better after dotnet/msbuild#9570, and for the remaining 10%, it's essentially the same as #37230.

Closing in favor of #37230, but I'll make that one a little more broad. And if you're seeing this with a recent version of MSBuild, it might be good to let the MSBuild team know 🙂

[Matheos96]

Can you clarify what version of the SDK/MSBuild you're using?

@Forgind Ok, great! As you can see from the screenshots, I used .NET 8.0.101 SDK.

I can't see from the PR, maybe just missing it, but what SDK version will include dotnet/msbuild#9570?

[Forgind]

Can you clarify what version of the SDK/MSBuild you're using?

@Forgind Ok, great! As you can see from the screenshots, I used .NET 8.0.101 SDK.

🤦 I can be blind sometimes; you're totally right

I can't see from the PR, maybe just missing it, but what SDK version will include dotnet/msbuild#9570?

That looks like it was merged in January, so it most likely ended up in 17.10 MSBuild, which went into the 8.0.3xx SDK.