c++ - Has anyone successfully modified vcvars*.bat in Visual Studio to point to a shared build tools location and been able to use MSBuild?

Question

Our group has some simple regression machines that build different C++ code bases regularly, and they all use different versions of the Visual Studio build tools. Rather than try to install a lot of different versions of Visual Studio on the build systems, the tools are copied to a standard mounted location and used from there.

Now, the team that set this system up uses a custom build system rather than MSBuild, but I am trying to use these machines with MSBuild (which is also copied to the mounted location) to build an existing VS solution file. Does anyone know how to modify a vcvars batch file enough so that these tools being in an alternate locations will work properly without having to install anything to the build node?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65599967/has-anyone-successfully-modified-vcvars-bat-in-visual-studio-to-point-to-a-shar

Answer 1

Not sure what point you want to describe. And as far as I know, you can just download the msbuild open source code and then basically add your custom build tool to the msbuild code.

In this way, the generated new msbuild tool is perfectly embedded with your custom tool. This is the best solution.

Simply changing the vcvars*.bat and other related files on the msbuild folder of vs2019 is not helpful. You must start at the stage of msbuild development.

And thanks for Microsoft to open up the source code of msbuild, in fact, this is to facilitate users to embed custom tools.