Lately I have been doing less and less C-Sharp code, and the times I do have to dive in, I try to use CAKE or another some similar system for my build scripts. However my current client has a personal preference of using Windows batch files, which is fine until it looks for a version of MSBuild that I do not have installed!
An example of how existing script files may look would been
@echo off "C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\12.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe" SampleProject.msbuild
Now if I had MSBuild 12.0 installed, that would not be a problem, however I have version 14.0, so I have started changing the scripts to look a bit like this
set msbuild.exe=
for /D %%D in (%SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4*) do set msbuild.exe=%%D\MSBuild.exe
if not defined msbuild.exe each error: can't find MSBuild.exe & goto :eof
if not exist "%msbuild.exe%" echo error: %msbuild.exe%: not found &goto :eof
@echo %msbuild.exe% SampleProject.msbuild
pause
:eof
I came across the code for this on StackOverflow.