VS2015 / MsBuild / vsvars32.bat : Cannot determine the location of the VS installation

Question

I use a batch to build my solution. It work fine with Visual Studio 2013. But with Visual Studio 2015 this error occurs :

ERROR: Cannot determine the location of the VS installation

Batch for VS2013

call "%VS120COMNTOOLS%vsvars32.bat"
msbuild solution.sln /t:rebuild /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform="Any CPU"

Work fine.

Batch for VS2015

call "%VS140COMNTOOLS%vsvars32.bat"
msbuild solution.sln /t:rebuild /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform="Any CPU"

ERROR: Cannot determine the location of the VS installation.

---

The environment variable VS140COMNTOOLS is defined to

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\Tools

It's not the good path on my OS (Windows 8.1 64 bits). So I set VS140COMNTOOLS to

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\Tools

But error message still the same.

If anyone has ideas...
Thanks in advance :)

EDIT

I have found this temporary workaround with mklink (and add compatibility for older Visual Studio) :

IF NOT "%VS140COMNTOOLS%" == "" (  
    IF NOT EXIST "%VS140COMNTOOLS%" (  
        mklink /J "%VS140COMNTOOLS%" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\Tools"  
    )  
    call "%VS140COMNTOOLS%vsvars32.bat"  
    echo Visual Studio 2015...
) ELSE (  
    IF NOT "%VS120COMNTOOLS%" == "" (  
        call "%VS120COMNTOOLS%vsvars32.bat"  
       echo Visual Studio 2013...
    ) ELSE (  
        call "%VS110COMNTOOLS%vsvars32.bat"  
        echo Visual Studio 2012...
    )  
)   

... and after call msbuild.

Have you a best solution ?...

Answer 1

For me, the path in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\SxS\VS7 was missing (x86).

It can be solved with this .reg file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\SxS\VS7]
"14.0"="C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\\"

Thank you for you hint.

Answer 2

I recently had the same issue. Problem was an overly long PATH, resulting in the C:\Windows\System32\reg.exe command not being found when called in the batch file. I removed what I could from my PATH and this corrected the problem.

Answer 3

I had a similar problem with VS 2013 and %VS110COMNTOOLS%... I tried loads of stuff that I found over the internet but none worked, also the most common solution that I found online was that C:\windows\system32 was missing from the PATH enviroment variable, but on my machine all the variables were correct and pointing to the right directories.

I had a windows 10 image with vs2017 installed and no other visual studios previously installed, so I restored that image, then proceeded to install VS2013, then I installed VS2010 and then finally installed VS2012.

After doing this the builds went fine and the error disappeared... I guess that installing VS2012 as the last one fixed the problem concerning the VS110COMNTOOLS variable, even tho I tried to reinstall all the visual studios before rolling back to the windows 10 image I had.

I hope you can do something similar on your machine, try to restore your system to a point before the visual studio installations and then install the visual studios you need leaving the VS2015 as the last one.