Question

We have a Team City Build Server running and want to compile a Visual C++ project. So far this would be easy, since I’ve setup our Windows Build Agent with the Windows SDK, but we don’t have a solution / project file.

The project files are instead created with CMake. CMake seems to be a little bit dumb (can’t generate Solution when Visual Studio is not installed), but with some tricks, I could get it to do it. The solution can then be built with MSBuild.

And here comes the problem. For this to work automatically, I need to call the Windows SDK’s SetEnv.cmd. And I can’t seem to find it automatically. It’s in the bin sub directory of the Windows SDK, but neither bin nor the root are in the path, and the %mssdk% environment variable is set by the SetEnv.cmd and is not available beforehand!

Adding the Windows SDK\bin dir to the PATH leads to SetEnv.cmd no longer working (exits with a message like The x86 compilers are not currently installed and Jump target Set_x86 not found.

The start menu link is calling the SetEnv.cmd with the Windows SDK dir as working directory instead. But if I add the root directory to the PATH, Bin\SetEnv.cmd is not available.

How can I find SetEnv.cmd automatically? Even setting an environment variable to the full path of the setenv.cmd doesn’t work, and when I define %mssdk% as the sdk dir, then call %mssdk%\bin\SetEnv doesn’t work as well. I also tried to define %mssdk%, then cd %mssdk%, then calling bin\SetEnv. Also compilers not found in all these cases. It also doesn’t work if I manually cd to the root or bin dir on a command line and then call SetEnv.cmd…

The start menu link works fine though.

For the record, my solution for now, as strange as this is, is the following:

I created a MSBuild file that creates the solution file with CMake on the command line, then invokes the created solution with a MSBuild task. The MSBuild file can be easily built from TeamCity, though I needed some additional tricks to satisfy CMake’s stupid looking for the compiler, though I won’t invoke it thing. Not really satisfying, but it works.

Answer 1

My solution (sets %WindowsSdkPath%, so that SetEnv.cmd could be found under %WindowsSdkPath%Bin\):

@ECHO OFF

IF "%WindowsSdkVersion%"=="" (
  CALL :SetWindowsSdkVersionHelper HKCU > nul 2>&1
  IF ERRORLEVEL 1 CALL :SetWindowsSdkVersionHelper HKLM > nul 2>&1
  IF ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO ERROR_NOWSDK
)

CALL :SetWindowsSdkPathHelper > nul 2>&1
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO ERROR_NOWSDK
GOTO END

:SetWindowsSdkPathHelper
SET WindowsSdkPath=
FOR /F "tokens=1,2*" %%i in ('REG QUERY "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\%WindowsSdkVersion%" /V InstallationFolder') DO (
    IF "%%i"=="InstallationFolder" (
        SET "WindowsSdkPath=%%k"
    )
)
IF "%WindowsSdkPath%"=="" EXIT /B 1
EXIT /B 0

:SetWindowsSdkVersion
CALL :GetWindowsSdkVersionHelper HKCU > nul 2>&1
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 CALL :GetWindowsSdkVersionHelper HKLM > nul 2>&1
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 EXIT /B 1
EXIT /B 0

:SetWindowsSdkVersionHelper
SET WindowsSdkVersion=
FOR /F "tokens=1,2*" %%i in ('REG QUERY "%1\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SDKs\Windows" /V "CurrentVersion"') DO (
    IF "%%i"=="CurrentVersion" (
        SET "WindowsSdkVersion=%%k"
    )
)
IF "%WindowsSdkVersion%"=="" EXIT /B 1
EXIT /B 0

:ERROR_NOWSDK
ECHO The Windows SDK %WindowsSdkVersion% could not be found.
EXIT /B 1

:END

I was inspired for this by the SetEnv.cmd itself…