How do I deduce path to Azure SDK csrun.exe conveniently?

Question

I have some problems with Azure Compute Emulator not restarting properly. To resolve this I want to add csrun /devfabric:stop call to a pre-build step in Visual Studio solution.

The problem is csrun.exe is located in C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.4\bin on my machine and that path is not on the %PATH% directories list. I don't want to hardcode that path in my solution.

Is there some way to deduce the path like using some environment variable or something similar?

Answer 1

You can read the Azure SDK path from the registry by version. The last part of the path is the version ... Your code can either be set to a version or you can iterate over the v keys finding the latest. I would recommend having a constant for the version you support and as you take a new SDK as a pre-req.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SDKs\ServiceHosting\v1.4

There's an "InstallPath" key under those paths.