Customize Jenkins SSH Agent for Windows

While building a Docker image for Windows based Jenkins agent, I stumbled upon this challenge:

My team was using a Windows VM to act as a Jenkins Agent to build and deploy .NET apps

It works like a charm.

However, I would like to be 100% on Containers, so we decided to embark on the journey of dockerizing this VM.

Using as baseline jenkins/ssh-agent:windowsservercore-ltsc2022-jdk21 we extended that OOTB image by adding the required software installed on the VM:

• Nuget 6.10
• Visual Studio 2019 Build Tools
• Visual Studio 2019 Test Agent
• .NET Framework Developer Pack version 4.5.1–4.6.2
• MSDeploy (webdeploy)

The main challenge we faced was to copy/paste some files into a particular location

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\BuildTools\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v16.0

We kept on getting nasty errors like these each time we referenced that folder:

x86 : The term 'x86' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, 
script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path 
was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.
At line:1 char:40
+ Get-ChildItem -Path C:\`Program Files (x86)\`Microsoft Visual Studio\ ...
+                                        ~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : ObjectNotFound: (x86:String) [], CommandNotFound 
   Exception
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException

Our solution was switching the Work Directory and we never looked back (or had to reference such folder)

WORKDIR C:\\'Program Files (x86)'\\Microsoft Visual Studio\\2019\\BuildTools\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\VisualStudio\\v16.0

And that’s how you work around that nasty error.