This morning got an alert that an extension had an updated release. Turned out that the windows extension went from 1.7.0 to 1.7.1. Without thinking about it, I went ahead and allowed the update. Ever since, my scripts have been failing with the error

Unhandled exception: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'Windows' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

File name: 'Windows'
(.net exception stacktrace here)

It took a bit for me to try restarting an agent on one of my boxes and suddenly scripts started working on him.
So less of a question and more of a feature request/bug report.

1st. When I did the update it mentioned web server and app needing to restart, did not mention agents.

2nd. I can see that the agents pulled the new extension update automatically. It would be nice if they would either restart themselves or if there was an option for me to kick off a restart from central server page in BuildMaster vs me kicking off a service restart on each box myself.

Error was related to how we had base install Windows Management Framework/Powershell installed. Updating to WMF/Powershell 4 resolved this error. Working through some mistakes in the scripting, but if I can get through it all without any more questions, I'll mark this post as answered.

Sorry about the long delay in response.

Your answer was helpful as I had not realized that roles could contain variables in that way. It will help with some other stuff I was thinking about doing.

I did end up going with the powershell route as the some of our services do shuffle a bit. I think I have the script set up correctly, but when I execute the build step I get the following error:

Unhandled exception: System.Management.Automation.Runspaces.PSSnapInException: An error occurred while attempting to load the system Windows PowerShell snap-ins. Please contact Microsoft Customer Support Services. ---> System.Management.Automation.PSArgumentException: Unable to access Windows PowerShell PowerShellEngine registry information.

The agent is installed with the recommended user account. It's a Microsoft Server 2008 R2 server with service pack 1 and powershell 2. I couldn't find any information elsewhere on the site about how to resolve this. Help appreciated.

I am working on using BuildMaster to handle automated deployments for some of our windows services. Everything seems fine except for one thing. For some services, we will have it deployed on multiple servers, but only have it running on certain ones. This is due to a mixture of redundency, server usage, etc. I can't seem to determine a manner in which I can get service startup type and/or current running status into a variable and act on it conditionally.

I can see a manner in which I could use PSEval to pull this off, but wanted to make sure I wasn't missing a simpler solution.