Prebuild event in Visual Studio replacing $(SolutionDir) with *Undefined*

Question

I believe the problem is documented here moved here and looks like it might be a bug in visual studio, but I'm wondering if anyone knows of a workaround.

Basically I have the following two lines (among other things) one right after the other in the prebuild event.

"C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\MSBuild.exe" /p:configuration=Release;platform=x86 /t:rebuild "$(SolutionDir)Folder1\Project1.csproj"

"C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\MSBuild.exe" /p:configuration=Release;platform=x86 /t:rebuild "$(SolutionDir)Folder2\Folder3\Project2.csproj" 

The first one succeeds and the other fails saying that The command ""C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\MSBuild.exe" /p:configuration=Release;platform=x86 /t:rebuild "*Undefined*Folder2\Folder3\Project2.csproj"" exited with code 1..

Edit:
Figured out the problem was that one of the other projects with the same line as it's prebuild failed, since MSBuild itself doesn't know about the macros.

Answer 1

I fixed this by replacing all $(SolutionDir) with $(ProjectDir)..\.

It was due to MSBuild running each project independently, and thus not the solution. It worked fine in VS2010, but not on the build server.

Answer 2

You don't specify if this happens for many projects or just one or two.

If it is only in one or two projects, a temporary workaround might be to replace $(SolutionDir) with the explicit path that Folder2 is located in. For example, something like:

"C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\MSBuild.exe" /p:configuration=Release;platform=x86 /t:rebuild "C:\AllSolutions\ExampleSolutions\Folder2\Folder3\Project2.csproj"

but with the correct path for your project.

Answer 3

Allan's answer is exactly on the right path, but if you want to move to parent directory of the ProjectDir, or the $(ProjectDir)..\ output is going to be a string, you need to perform the 'go to parent directory' operation in msbuild.
Here is how you can achieve this:

<PropertyGroup>
  <TrimmedDir>$([System.IO.Path]::GetDirectoryName($(ProjectDir)))</TrimmedDir>
</PropertyGroup>

This code will set the parent directory path of the ProjectDir to TrimmedDir variable. [System.IO.Path]::GetDirectoryName() performs this operation.