$(SolutionDir) and MSBUILD
A while back I was working with a customer that was moving from doing all of their builds with the devenv command line to using MSBUILD. However we ran into a hiccup that did not make sense at first. Basically when they tried to build their solution using MSBUILD some of the custom build steps where failing because $(SolutionDir) was not defined.
After thinking about it a bit is became clear that MSBUILD did not define the SolutionBuild property that Visual Studio does. So where did that leave us?
There are a couple of basic approaches:
- Create a Custom Action (this would involve Custom Code) that walked up the directory structure and found the SLN file and then used that directory to create the SolutionDir.
- Use the command line option /Property:SolutionDir=<sln Dir> to set the value. This way it is controlled in one place.
- Change all of the pathing to be relative. In most groups it is relatively infrequent to be moving projects up and down the directory hierarchy.
Just thought I would share incase this comes up for someone else.
Zach