WriteColoredOutput vs Write-Error

[dcorriveau-omniscient]

Hey ! I'm using CCNet as my buils server, and from what I can tell, they are listening on the error stream to determine errors (basically all it does is it sets the <message level="Error"> tag so that it can be parsed and colored appropriately on the dashboard. However, since psake is outputting catched errors using WriteColoredOutput (well, manually changing the color of the shell text), those error messages aren't displayed red in the dashboard.

Is there an option that I missed that would allow me to achieve what I want, or could I add the option myself to tell psake to use write-error instead ? Would you accept that pull request ? Thanks !

[mrhockeymonkey]

I agree with the above. In my mind since the function Invoke-PSake is using cmdletbinding() and therefore accepts -erroraction it should really be able to throw a real powershell error instead of output that is colored red. This has bred a bit of confusion at my place of work. I would be happy to submit such a pull request. Thoughts?

[UberDoodles]

This could be resolved to some extent by issue #65, for which I have raised a pull request (#301).

The changes in that pull request mean that all of psake's messages are categorised (e.g. "error", "warning", "success", etc), and you can override how each of those messages are routed. For backwards-compatibility, the messages are handled in the same way as they always have (using WriteColoredOutput).

If we were to change the code to use Write-Error instead of WriteColoredOutput, this would be a breaking change that could cause people a lot of pain. So it might be better to leave WriteColoredOutput as the default, but be able to override it using the #65 solution.