where is msbuild.exe visual studio 2019?

Godot_v3.1-stable_mono_win64 (official distributed binary)

OS/device including version:

Windows 10 x64 Home Edition

Issue description:

When using the new Visual Studio 2019 Release Candidate (16.0.0 RC.3 as of writing) with MSBuild installed, Godot chooses it for building C# solutions. However, MSBuild.exe is not at the same location as with Visual Studio 2017 (and probably previous versions in general). The usual location was: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\MSBuild\15.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe (modulo a different VS install path) The new location seems to be: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\MSBuild\Current\Bin\MSBuild.exe

From what I looked up, this is because the last part of the path when trying to find MSBuild.exe is hardcoded: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/blob/3.1-stable/modules/mono/mono_reg_utils.py#L94

I don't know if there is any "clean way" of knowing the full path to MSBuild.exe for a given VS installation though.

Steps to reproduce:

MSBuild is the build platform for Microsoft and Visual Studio. This walkthrough introduces you to the building blocks of MSBuild and shows you how to write, manipulate, and debug MSBuild projects. You will learn about:

You can run MSBuild from Visual Studio, or from the Command Window. In this walkthrough, you create an MSBuild project file using Visual Studio. You edit the project file in Visual Studio, and use the Command Window to build the project and examine the results.

The Visual Studio project system is based on MSBuild. This makes it easy to create a new project file using Visual Studio. In this section, you create a Visual C# project file. You can choose to create a Visual Basic project file instead. In the context of this walkthrough, the difference between the two project files is minor.

To create a project file

In the previous section, you used Visual Studio to create a Visual C# project file. The project file is represented in Solution Explorer by the project node named BuildApp. You can use the Visual Studio code editor to examine the project file.

To examine the project file

Project files are XML-formatted files with the root node Project.

Most .NET projects have a Sdk attribute. These are called SDK-style projects.

There are many variations of .NET SDKs for special purposes; they are described at .NET Project SDKs.

The work of building an application is done with Target and Task elements.

The default target is not defined in the project file. Instead, it is specified in imported projects. The Import element specifies imported projects. For example, in a C# project, the default target is imported from the file Microsoft.CSharp.targets.

Imported files are effectively inserted into the project file wherever they are referenced.

In SDK-style projects, you don't see this import element, since the SDK attribute causes this file to be imported implicitly.

MSBuild keeps track of the targets of a build, and guarantees that each target is built no more than once.

Add a target to the project file. Add a task to the target that prints out a message.

To add a target and a task

The Message task is one of the many tasks that ships with MSBuild. For a complete list of available tasks and usage information, see Task reference.

The Message task takes the string value of the Text attribute as input and displays it on the output device (or writes it to one or more logs, if applicable). The HelloWorld target executes the Message task twice: first to display "Hello", and then to display "World".

If you try to build this project from Visual Studio, it won't build the target you defined. That's because Visual Studio chooses the default target, which is still the one in the imported .targets file.

Run MSBuild from the Developer Command Prompt for Visual Studio to build the HelloWorld target defined above. Use the -target or -t command-line switch to select the target.

To build the target:

By alternating between the code editor and the command window, you can change the project file and quickly see the results.

Build properties are name-value pairs that guide the build. Several build properties are already defined at the top of the project file:

All properties are child elements of PropertyGroup elements. The name of the property is the name of the child element, and the value of the property is the text element of the child element. For example,

defines the property named TargetFrameworkVersion, giving it the string value "v4.5".

Build properties may be redefined at any time. If

appears later in the project file, or in a file imported later in the project file, then TargetFrameworkVersion takes the new value "v3.5".

To get the value of a property, use the following syntax, where PropertyName is the name of the property:

Use this syntax to examine some of the properties in the project file.

To examine a property value

Many properties like Configuration are defined conditionally, that is, the Condition attribute appears in the property element. Conditional properties are defined or redefined only if the condition evaluates to "true". Note that undefined properties are given the default value of an empty string. For example,

means "If the Configuration property has not been defined yet, define it and give it the value 'Debug'".

Almost all MSBuild elements can have a Condition attribute. For more discussion about using the Condition attribute, see Conditions.

MSBuild reserves some property names to store information about the project file and the MSBuild binaries. MSBuildToolsPath is an example of a reserved property. Reserved properties are referenced with the $ notation like any other property. For more information, see How to: Reference the name or location of the project file and MSBuild reserved and well-known properties.

You can reference environment variables in project files the same way as build properties. For example, to use the PATH environment variable in your project file, use $(Path). If the project contains a property definition that has the same name as an environment variable, the property in the project overrides the value of the environment variable. For more information, see How to: Use environment variables in a build.

Properties may be defined on the command line using the -property or -p command line switch. Property values received from the command line override property values set in the project file and environment variables.

To set a property value from the command line:

MSBuild creates the Configuration property and gives it the value "Release".

Certain characters have special meaning in MSBuild project files. Examples of these characters include semicolons (;) and asterisks (*). In order to use these special characters as literals in a project file, they must be specified by using the syntax %, where represents the ASCII hexadecimal value of the character.

Change the Message task to show the value of the Configuration property with special characters to make it more readable.

To use special characters in the Message task:

For more information, see MSBuild special characters.

An item is a piece of information, typically a file name, that is used as an input to the build system. For example, a collection of items representing source files might be passed to a task named Compile to compile them into an assembly.

All items are child elements of ItemGroup elements. The item name is the name of the child element, and the item value is the value of the Include attribute of the child element. The values of items with the same name are collected into item types of that name. For example,

defines an item group containing two items. The item type Compile has two values: Program.cs and Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs.

The following code creates the same item type by declaring both files in one Include attribute, separated by a semicolon.

For more information, see Items.

To get the values of an item type, use the following syntax, where ItemType is the name of the item type:

Use this syntax to examine the Compile item type in the project file.

To examine item type values:

The values of an item type are separated with semicolons by default.

To change the separator of an item type, use the following syntax, where ItemType is the item type and Separator is a string of one or more separating characters:

Change the Message task to use carriage returns and line feeds (%0A%0D) to display Compile items one per line.

To display item type values one per line

You can use the wildcards "*", "**", and "?" with the Include attribute to add items to an item type. For example,

adds all files with the file extension .jpeg in the images folder to the Photos item type, while

adds all files with the file extension .jpeg in the images folder, and all its subfolders, to the Photos item type. For more examples, see How to: Select the files to build.

Notice that as items are declared they are added to the item type. For example,

creates an item type named Photo containing all files in the images folder with a file extension of either .jpeg or .gif. This is equivalent to the following line:

You can exclude an item from an item type with the Exclude attribute. For example,

adds all files with the file extension .cs to the Compile item type, except for files whose names contain the string Designer. For more examples, see How to: Exclude files from the build.

The Exclude attribute only affects the items added by the Include attribute in the item element that contains them both. For example,

would not exclude the file Form1.cs, which was added in the preceding item element.

To include and exclude items

Items may contain metadata in addition to the information gathered from the Include and Exclude attributes. This metadata can be used by tasks that require more information about items than just the item value.

Item metadata is declared in the project file by creating an element with the name of the metadata as a child element of the item. An item can have zero or more metadata values. For example, the following CSFile item has Culture metadata with a value of "Fr":

To get the metadata value of an item type, use the following syntax, where ItemType is the name of the item type and MetaDataName is the name of the metadata:

To examine item metadata:

Notice how the phrase "Compile.DependentUpon" appears several times. The use of metadata with this syntax within a target causes "batching". Batching means that the tasks within the target are executed once for each unique metadata value. This is the MSBuild script equivalent of the common "for loop" programming construct. For more information, see Batching.

Whenever an item is added to an item list, that item is assigned some well-known metadata. For example, %(Filename) returns the file name of any item. For a complete list of well-known metadata, see Well-known item metadata.

To examine well-known metadata:

By comparing the two examples above, you can see that while not every item in the Compile item type has DependentUpon metadata, all items have the well-known Filename metadata.

Item lists can be transformed into new item lists. To transform an item list, use the following syntax, where is the name of the item type and is the name of the metadata:

For example, an item list of source files can be transformed into a collection of object files using an expression like @(SourceFiles -> '%(Filename).obj'). For more information, see Transforms.

To transform items using metadata:

Notice that metadata expressed in this syntax does not cause batching.

To learn how to create a simple project file one step at a time, on Windows, try out the Walkthrough: Creating an MSBuild project file from scratch.

If you're primarily using the .NET SDK, you may wish to continue reading at MSBuild Reference for .NET SDK Projects.

With Visual Studio 2019 and later, it's installed under the Visual Studio installation folder. For a typical default installation on Windows 10, MSBuild.exe is under the installation folder in MSBuild\Current\Bin.