The "Exec" task needs a command to execute, the poor thing

Here’s a strange error message.

I was trying to build a project in VS2005, and got this instead of a successful build:

The “Exec” task needs a command to execute.

After pooling out a few hairs, I remembers that I recently have edited the pre-build actions for this project.

Looking this up, I found that I left a spare newline at the end of the pre-build script. So VS2005 sent msbuild an order to run an empty command.

Now I wonder,had the VS2005 guys have ever heard of StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries?

They could’ve easily ignore empty lines, or better yet, issue a warning for that kinda stuff.