I’m using a postbuild event to fire off resgen and AL to create DLLs from resource files (for nice multilingual content). This event looks a bit like:

"$(WindowsSDKDir)bin\resgen.exe" "$(SolutionDir)\Langfr.resx"
"$(WindowsSDKDir)bin\AL" /t:lib /culture:fr /embed:"$(SolutionDir)Langfr.resources" /out:"$(SolutionDir)bin\Language.fr.dll"

As such, when I build this locally from either VS2010 or MSBuild hitting the csproj file, all is fine. The resx file is picked up by resgen and creates a resources file, which is in turn picked up by AL and embedded into a dll. It actually appears in the build log/command line as something similar to:

PostBuildEvent:
  "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\bin\resgen.exe" "..\Lang\fr.resx"
  "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\bin\AL" /t:lib /culture:fr /embed:"..\Lang\fr.resources" /out:"..\bin\Language.fr.dll"

However, when I committed this into my branch and saw TeamCity pick it up, even though the build appeared to pass the build log shows the truth:

[PostBuildEvent] Exec
[Exec] "bin\resgen.exe" "..\Lang\fr.resx" "bin\AL" /t:lib /culture:fr /embed:"..\Lang\fr.resources" /out:"..\bin\Language.fr.dll"

Eh? Where’s the path to the  Windows SDK? Maybe it’s not installed on the Build Server. Fine, I’ll pop off and install it. And restart. And try again. Still the same result. What’s up with that? I whacked in a <Message> tag to output the value of $(WindowsSDKDir)… and it shows the correct path!

I still don’t understand why the value of $(WindowsSDKDir) is correctly set, but when used in a post build event it appears to be empty. If anyone can help with that, please let me know.

So, to my hack: I have yet to discover the correct way to fix this so have instead edited the MSBuild build step on the CI server to override the empty value with a specific one (i.e., the location of the windows SDK on the build server):

(A little tip: for some reason I needed to remove the trailing quote from the path parameter else it resulted in “C:\blahblah\”bin\resgen.exe” instead of “C:\blahblah\bin\resgen.exe”)

TeamCity doesn’t approve of this and instead suggests you use a TeamCity Build Parameter instead of an MSBuild parameter; unfortunately I couldn’t get this to work so am sticking with the command line parameter, as above. If anyone can inform me how to do this correctly, I’d appreciate it.