Visual Studio 2010 Local Machine-Project Specific Properties

Question

I am using VC++ with multiple projects that require a 3rd party library. As developers may have this library in different paths, each developer sets the local machine/user's Microsoft.Cpp.Win32.user property sheet with the appropriate paths.

Now we using a new version of the 3rd party library with some of the projects. As before, different developers may have the new library in different paths. How do we set local machine and project specific paths so that we can compile both old and new library projects?

Modifying a project's 'VC++ Directories' changes the project file (.vcxproj) which then poses a problem as we do not want to commit local settings into the repo.

Answer 1

We normally set an environment variable for each library that can be set by each developer in their environment in a env.bat file they run before running devenv (some made up examples) :-

ZLIB_ROOT=c:\somewhere\thirdparty\zlib
BOOST_ROOT=c:\somewhere\thirdparty\boost\version_123

and then in the project files add directories use "$(ZLIB_ROOT)/Include" or "$(ZLIB_ROOT)/Lib/x86" (all made up examples again...)

That way they will resolve correctly for any developer and they can have a different env.bat script for each version