Can you prevent MSBuild.exe from running Build Events?

Pre/PostBuildEvents are properties, so to override them just set them from command line to empty string.

msbuild foo.sln /p:PreBuildEvent= /p:PostBuildEvent=

It seems that the answer is different depending on the project type.

For C/C++ projects (.vcxproj), you can suppress the PostBuildEvent on the command line with /p:PostBuildEventUseInBuild=false, as AndreiM suggests.

(Setting /p:PostBuildEvent to an empty string doesn't work for C++ projects, and I can't find any other way to override the post-build command).

For C# projects (.csproj), you can suppress the PostBuildEvent on the command line with /p:PostBuildEvent=, as most other responders suggest.

You could also make the property conditional

<PreBuildEvent Condition="'$(BuildingInsideVisualStudio)' == '' Or '$(BuildingInsideVisualStudio)' == true"> ... </PreBuildEvent>

What I would do is define a new .proj file, lets say C:\Data\SupressBuildEvents.proj and it would contain:

<Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
    <Target Name="PostBuildEvent"/>

    <Target Name="PreBuildEvent" />
</Project>

Then you need to specify that these files get imported after Microsoft.Common.targets and you would do so by defining the well known property CustomAfterMicrosoftCommonTargets to the path of that file. So lets your build script is in a file named MyBuild.proj you would invoke it as:

msbuild MyBuild.proj /p:CustomAfterMicrosoftCommonTargets="C:\Data\SupressBuildEvents.proj
"

This will cause MSBuild to import your file after the Microsoft.Common.targets file gets imported and it will override the PostBuildEvent and PreBuildEvent targets and make them do nothing.

Now if your MyBuild.proj files uses the MSBuild task to build other targets then you should also pass them this property as follows:

<Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
    <ItemGroup>
        <ProjectsToBuild Include=" FILL THIS IN "/>
    </ItemGroup>

    <Target Name="YourTarget">
        <MSBuild Projects="@(ProjectsToBuild)"
                 Properties="CustomAfterMicrosoftCommonTargets=$(CustomAfterMicrosoftCommonTargets)"/>
    </Target>

</Project>

This is necessary because by design properties on the parent script are not passed to the builds executed by the MSBuild task.

I also played a little with msbuild foo.vcxproj /p:PreBuildEvent= /p:PostBuildEvent=, but for me it didn't work, probably because I am using custom props files.

What I found to work however was /p:PostBuildEventUseInBuild=false