Deploying to Azure from psake - “No snap-ins have been registered”

Cloud hosting really lends itself to continuous deployment approaches - scripted provisioning models and blue/green deployment are well catered for. In the case of Microsoft Azure, the Powershell Cmdlets integrate easily with our psake build scripts.

Unfortunately, the cmdlets are 64 bit only and most of the popular CI servers are java-based and recommend using the 32 bit JVM for a variety of presumably good reasons. This results in 32 bit powershell kicking off and generating the error message “No snap-ins have been registered for Windows PowerShell version 2”.

Following is a modification to the psake.cmd file that ensures the 64 bit version of powershell is called on 64 bit systems:

@echo off
IF EXIST %windir%\sysnative\WindowsPowershell (
%windir%\sysnative\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "& '%~dp0\psake.ps1' %*"
) ELSE (
powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "& '%~dp0\psake.ps1' %*"
)