A while back I wrote about Reserved Properties in MSBuild 3.5, now its time to update that post to include reserved properties for MSBuild 4.0. There are a number of new properties here is the list:

•    MSBuild
•    MSBuildBinPath
•    MSBuildExtensionsPath
•    MSBuildExtensionsPath32
•    MSBuildExtensionsPath64
•    MSBuildLastTaskResult
•    MSBuildNodeCount
•    MSBuildOverrideTasksPath
•    MSBuildProgramFiles32
•    MSBuildProjectDefaultTargets
•    MSBuildProjectDirectory
•    MSBuildProjectDirectoryNoRoot
•    MSBuildProjectExtension
•    MSBuildProjectFile
•    MSBuildProjectFullPath
•    MSBuildProjectName
•    MSBuildStartupDirectory
•    MSBuildThisFile
•    MSBuildThisFileDirectory
•    MSBuildThisFileDirectoryNoRoot
•    MSBuildThisFileExtension
•    MSBuildThisFileFullPath
•    MSBuildThisFileName
•    MSBuildToolsPath
•    MSBuildToolsVersion

If you want to see what the values are you can execute this simple proj file that I created.

For me the results are:

C:\Data\Development\My Code\Community\MSBuild>msbuild ReservedProps02.proj /m /nologo
Build started 3/18/2010 12:43:49 AM.
     1>Project "C:\Data\Development\My Code\Community\MSBuild\ReservedProps02.proj" on node 1 (default targets).
     1>PrintValues:
         MSBuild:
         MSBuildBinPath: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30128
         MSBuildExtensionsPath: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild
         MSBuildExtensionsPath32: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild
         MSBuildExtensionsPath64: C:\Program Files\MSBuild
         MSBuildLastTaskResult: true
         MSBuildNodeCount: 8
         MSBuildOverrideTasksPath:
         MSBuildProgramFiles32: C:\Program Files (x86)
         MSBuildProjectDefaultTargets: PrintValues
         MSBuildProjectDirectory: C:\Data\Development\My Code\Community\MSBuild
         MSBuildProjectDirectoryNoRoot: Data\Development\My Code\Community\MSBuild
         MSBuildProjectExtension: .proj
         MSBuildProjectFile: ReservedProps02.proj
         MSBuildProjectFullPath: C:\Data\Development\My Code\Community\MSBuild\ReservedProps02.proj
         MSBuildProjectName: ReservedProps02
         MSBuildStartupDirectory: C:\Data\Development\My Code\Community\MSBuild
         MSBuildThisFile: ReservedProps02.proj
         MSBuildThisFileDirectory: C:\Data\Development\My Code\Community\MSBuild\
         MSBuildThisFileDirectoryNoRoot: Data\Development\My Code\Community\MSBuild\
         MSBuildThisFileExtension: .proj
         MSBuildThisFileFullPath: C:\Data\Development\My Code\Community\MSBuild\ReservedProps02.proj
         MSBuildThisFileName: ReservedProps02
         MSBuildToolsPath: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30128
         MSBuildToolsVersion: 4.0
     1>Done Building Project "C:\Data\Development\My Code\Community\MSBuild\ReservedProps02.proj" (default targets
       ).

If you want to see the correct valus for MSBuildNodeCount make sure to use the /m switch when you invoke msbuild.exe.

I won’t go over these properties in detail here, because they are mostly obvious but I would like to point out a couple really useful properties, those include.

MSBuildThisFile
MSBuildThisFileDirectory
MSBuildThisFileDirectoryNoRoot

These properties can be used to locate the path to the file that you are currently in. So if you have a shared .targets file and it will execute an .exe in the same folder you can use the MSBuildThisFileDirectory property to resolve the full path to that tool reliably. This has historically been difficult. See a recent question on Stackoverflow.com about it at How can I get the path of the current msbuild file? If you are not using MSBuild 4.0 and need to resolve the location to a .targets file then see that post for what you will need to do.