MSBuildExtensionsPath32 not set correctly?

Question

For the life of me, I cannot find where this value is actually set. It SHOULD be pointing at C:\Program Files\MSBuild, but on our build box, it's pointing at C:. How can I change this?

Solution

MSBuildExtensionsPath32 is set internally by MSBuild. (BuildEngine.BuildPropertyGroup.SetExtensionsPathProperties)

But you could override it by setting an environment variable.

SET MSBuildExtensionsPath="C:\Program Files\MSBuild"

Or you could override the value in your project file :

<PropertyGroup>
  <MSBuildExtensionsPath>C:\Users\madgnome\Desktop\msbuild</MSBuildExtensionsPath>

  <!-- It works too with relative path -->
  <!--<MSBuildExtensionsPath>..\msbuild</MSBuildExtensionsPath>-->
</PropertyGroup>

<Import Project="$(MSBuildBinPath)\Microsoft.CSharp.targets" />
<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" />

Comments

[Jamie Nordmeyer]

Thanks. I played around with the SET command, and this got me past that error, but introduced another. I think I'm going to pass it off to my architect and see what he comes with.

[Jamie Nordmeyer]

Yeah, MSBuild was and is a bit of a hot mess. It's definitely better with .NET Core, though... but I still wish that Microsoft had been able to get the project.json system to work. Alas.

[speckledcarp]

Yeah, especially since the documentation is incomplete - in the case of the docs I was looking at, "Current" wasn't even mentioned as a valid option. They had 4.0 listed as the newest valid option, which was what I was using.