How to "get rid of" $(SolutionDir) when building Visual Studio project from outside Visual Studio

Question

I want to build a .vcxproj via MSBuild from outside Visual Studio. The problem is that there are many occurrences of $(SolutionDir) inside the .vcxproj file which apparently only get set correctly when the solution is loaded.

When I replace $(SolutionDir) with the actual absolute path, it works. But other people on other machines are working with the same project file, so this is not a solution.

Is there a solution or hack to solve this problem?

Answer 1

You can set the variable by passing parameter arguments:

/p:SolutionDir=path 

So, rather than editing the solution file, you can create a build script that sets up the environment and executes MSBuild accordingly, leaving the Visual Studio file as is for development work.