Getting the full path to MSBuild.exe

[uli-weltersbach]

Hi

I feel like I'm missing some obvious way to determine the full path to MSBuild.exe.
To illustrate, here's where we're at currently:

1. Run vswhere.exe -latest -requires Microsoft.Component.MSBuild -property installationFolder.

2. The return value "C:\Path\To\VisualStudio\Root" seems useless, because we have to make an additional assumption reg. the location of MSBuild.exe inside that folder.
   We could append "\MSBuild\15.0\MSBuild\bin\MSBuild.exe", but that seems to defeat the purpose of not making assumptions/including hard coded paths in our build scripts.

3. Run vswhere.exe -latest -requires Microsoft.Component.MSBuild -property installationVersion.

4. The return value "15.0.26430.6" seems useless, because the actual path is "C:\Path\To\My\VisualStudio\Root\15.0\" which means we'd again need to do additional handling, e.g. using either a 2 or 3 digit substring based on whether the major revision is less than/greater than 10.

[uli-weltersbach]

On a more general note: Is this tool in any way intended to be runnable on a build server which ONLY has MS Build Tools installed, i.e. no version of Visual Studio?

EDIT: Having read through #41 I guess I'll look somewhere else :(

[3F]

you can try something like this if you need only full path to msbuild from VS2017+ through vswhere:

...
for /f "usebackq tokens=1* delims=: " %%a in (`!vswbin! -latest -requires Microsoft.Component.MSBuild`) do (
    if /i "%%a"=="installationPath" set vspath=%%b
    if /i "%%a"=="installationVersion" set vsver=%%b
)
...
for /f "tokens=1,2 delims=." %%a in ("!vsver!") do (
    set vsver=%%a.%%b
)
set msbuildPath=!vspath!\MSBuild\!vsver!\Bin

this part from hMSBuild helper that you already noticed above (we're using this for simple access to msbuild tools -_- as a common tool for all VS & .NET versions)

just to be clear, the latest version also already supports a local vswhere tool (#41 *now I updated info there) and via key -vswhere-version can control this behaviour:

 -vswhere-version {num} - Specific version of vswhere. Where {num}:
                          * Versions: 1.0.50 ...
                          * Keywords:
                            `latest` to get latest available version;
                            `local`  to use only local versions:
                                     (.bat;.exe /or from +15.2.26418.1 VS-build);

[uli-weltersbach]

Thanks for the reply, I've already downloaded hMSBuild.bat and am working on getting it into our build system :)

[heaths]

If you look at the wiki there are plenty of examples, and issue #61 describes - as do the docs and command line usage text - that vswhere searches for VS by default but can easily support Build Tools as well.

[heaths]

Also, as of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.2 vswhere will always be available in %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer if VS, Build Tools, Remote Tools, or other 2017 family of products or newer is installed.

But that still doesn't change the fact that support for -legacy is, as documented, limited. That was a feature I added solely to find the roots of then-supported Visual Studio installations that did not use the query API. Older versions of MSBuild were not limited to being installed by VS and are locatable by other means. You will need to script your environment appropriately to handle legacy MSBuild.