Inside the Microsoft® Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build

Environment Variables

We have described the basic usage of properties. Now we’ll discuss a few other related aspects. When you are building your applications, sometimes you might need to extract values from environment variables. This is a lot simpler than you might imagine using MSBuild. You can access values, just as you would properties, for environment variables. For example, take a look at the following project file, Properties04.proj.

<Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">

  <Target Name="PrintEnvVar">
    <Message Text="Temp: $(Temp)" />
    <Message Text="Windir: $(windir)" />
    <Message Text="VS80COMNTOOLS: $(VS80COMNTOOLS)" />
    <Message Text="VS90COMNTOOLS: $(VS90COMNTOOLS)" />
  </Target>

</Project>

In this example, we ...