Using Visual Studio's 'cl' from a normal command line

Question

Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 (and perhaps 2008 for all I know) require the command line user to run in the \'Visual Studio Command Prompt\'. When starting this command promp

Answer 1

My version of opening the visual studio command line for Visual Studio Command Prompt in visual-studio-2010. Used internally to build a library/project and then perform some extra steps with the resulting DLL files.

Copy these lines to your Compile and execute other steps.cmd file, or similar.

@echo off

REM Load Visual Studio's build tools
call "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat" x86

REM Choose what you want to do, 1 or 2 by (un)commenting

REM     1. Add your cl.exe (or msbuild.exe or other) commands here
REM msbuild.exe MyProject.csproj
REM cl.exe
REM custom-step.exe  %*
REM pause

REM     2. Open a normal interactive system command shell with all variables loaded
%comspec% /k

In this version of the script, I "stay" in interactive command line mode afterwards. Comment to REM %comspec% /k to only use the script for non-interactive purposes.