CODEWITHSUNDEEP
visual-studiomsbuildvisual-studio-2017
user69453
user69453

Reputation: 1405

Different Paths To msbuild in VS2017

OS: Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.14393]

VS-Version: 2017 Community

When I run vswhere.exe I get the following back and based on on the official vswhere documentation I can build the path to msbuild and this seems to work:

C:\Users\user\Desktop>"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\vswhere.exe"
Visual Studio Locator version 1.0.62 [query version 1.10.80.60812]
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
[...]
installationPath: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community
[...]
C:\Users\user\Desktop>"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\MSBuild\15.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe"
Microsoft (R)-Buildmodul, Version 15.1.1012.6693

If I start the developer command prompt located in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\Common7\Tools\VsMSBuildCmd.bat" I get the following result:

C:\Users\user>"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\Common7\Tools\VsMSBuildCmd.bat"
**********************************************************************
** Visual Studio 2017 MSBuild Command Prompt
** Copyright (c) 2017 Microsoft Corporation
**********************************************************************
C:\Users\user>where msbuild
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\MSBuild\15.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\MSBuild.exe
  1. Why and what is the second path returned after starting the developer command prompt
  2. I always use the first path ("C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\MSBuild\15.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe") to call msbuild for building C/C++/VC++ Projects. Is this in someway wrong?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 4291

Answers (1)

Martin Ullrich
Martin Ullrich

Reputation: 100761

VS 2017 switched to local copies of msbuild, if you used a VS 2015 command prompt, you would see a different global path.

The where command lists all the matching executable files that it finds on the PATH, but only the first one will be used by the command prompt when you run an msbuild command.

The second msbuild.exe you see is part of the .NET Framework - this is the version of MSBuild that was integrated into and shipped as part of the .NET Framework. This version is old compared to the ones installed by recent versions of Visual Studio. But it will likely be continued to be included in .NET Framework for compatibility reasons. It is even able to build a lot of projects that will then use the targets and tasks installed by VS - only project format changes that required changes to MSBuild itself will be incompatible (like the new project format used for .NET Core projects).

You should always use the VS 2017 version of msbuild.exe to always get build results consistent with visual studio.

Upvotes: 5

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