Discovering and running MSBuild

[apodtele]

GfW is not MSYS2, but I want to run MSBuild. It works if I just add the path to the executable as described.

1. Can this path be discovered and added during installation?
2. Does it belong to new /etc/profile.d/msbuild.sh?

Please advise on the proper setup.

[dscho]

After sdk init build-extra (needs to be run only once), this should be available: https://github.com/git-for-windows/build-extra/tree/main/msbuild (we use this in our automation).

[apodtele]

This implies that I need Git for Windows SDK to begin with, which is advertised for your development community, not exactly for me.

I am a really minimalist developer: I use vi and git from the GfW distribution and MSBuild from Build Tools for Visual Studio. It turns out that if I just add the path, MSBuild works from Git Bash. This almost matches VS Code: a good code editor, integrated git, and a build system. I am really happy after I added msbuild.sh to /etc/profile.d/

# Set path to MSBuild

MSBUILD="/c/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/2022/BuildTools/MSBuild/Current/Bin"

[ -d "$MSBUILD" ] && PATH="$PATH:$MSBUILD"

export PATH

I now wonder if I can integrate the CDB debugger as well.

[dscho]

I added msbuild.sh to /etc/profile.d/

You will find that it works better across Git for Windows upgrades if you move this into ~/.bash_profile.

[apodtele]

I followed your advise and also added an alias with color.

alias msbuild='MSBuild.exe -clp:ForceConsoleColor'

[dscho]

Nice! I'm sure this discussion will help others who are in the same boat as you. Thanks for starting it!