Reported by Paul Blair Feb 11, 2017 at 06:06 AM Azure DevOps

I am trying to run a build of a Visual C++ project that is generated by the Unity3D Game Engine. As part of the project, Unity includes an .exe file that is called by nmake to actually perform the build. According to the Unity folks, this executable, il2cpp.exe, knows exactly which flags to pass to the compiler, which files to compile, which headers to include, etc; it enables incremental building support; and after building the binary, it parses the linker output in order to enable stack trace support.

When I try running the build in Visual Studio Team Services, MSBuild runs fine and is able to execute il2cpp.exe, but the build fails immediately thereafter. We were able to determine that il2cpp.exe is looking for and not finding the Visual Studio 2015 install path using the registry key

SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0_Config\InstallDir

and also the Windows 10 SDK install path using the registry key

SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v10.0\InstallationFolder

Unfortunately, on the Visual Studio Team Services hosted build agent, it looks like these keys (or at least the first of them) are not pointing anywhere, or maybe the build doesn't have access to them.

Should we be expecting to be able to read these registry keys from a build? If not, is there another recommended way to determine these installation locations?