Is there a way to global set the platform toolset to v110 on VS 2013? - visual-studio

Question

I've been perusing through similar questions on stack overflow and could not find a specific or definitive enough answer to this question:
I am currently using MSVS 2013 Ultimate, and have separately downloaded MS build tools 2013 as well. I am trying to install some npm modules that use the earlier platform toolset of MSBuild to compile and after following instructions from MSDN on how to Modify the Target Framework to a different platform, those did not help me successfully download the packages either. My current project is dealing with javascript and I'm not using visual studio in the near future, so I'm extremely flexible in terms of changing its configuration settings at the moment.
I am afraid that I'll have to resort to downloading VS 2012 in order to do this, unless someone found a clear cut alternative.
I am currently running everything on Windows 8 Enterprise x64.
Thanks in advance for all the help.

Answer 1

You can make use of the ImportBefore extension points for MsBuild: add propertysheets to
$(VCTargetsPath)\Platforms\$(Platform)\ImportBefore
and add properties to them forcing the PlatformToolset irregardless of what is set in the vcproj files. With VS2013 it is a bit more difficult to do this compared to VS2012 (I used this trick there to globally build everything using the v110_xp toolset) but it still works.
Suppose you are on a 64bit machine and want to override settings for all C++ projects for the Win32 platform, add a property sheet called override_platformtoolset.props (the name doesn't matter, as long as it ends with .props) to the directory C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\V120\Platforms\Win32\ImportBefore\Default with this content:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project ToolsVersion="4.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
<PropertyGroup>
<PlatformToolSet>v110</PlatformToolSet>
<DefaultPlatformToolset>v110</DefaultPlatformToolset>
</PropertyGroup>
<Target Name="ShowOverrideInfo1" BeforeTargets="Build">
<Message Text="Overriding PlatformToolset!" Importance="high"/>
</Target>
</Project>
Then add another file called override_platformtoolset to C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\V120\Platforms\Win32\ImportBefore with this content:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project ToolsVersion="4.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
<PropertyGroup>
<PlatformToolSet>v110</PlatformToolSet>
<ToolsetPropsFound>false</ToolsetPropsFound>
<MinSupportedVCTargetsVersion>v110</MinSupportedVCTargetsVersion>
</PropertyGroup>
<Target Name="ShowOverrideInfo2" BeforeTargets="Build">
<Message Text="Overriding PlatformToolset!" Importance="high"/>
</Target>
</Project>
The targets are just there to make sure you put the files in the correct location: if you build now, you should see the Overriding PlatformToolset! message twice (and see that cl.exe and link.exe are invoked from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\VC\bin). Else something is wrong.
If you wonder how/why this works inspect Microsoft.Cpp.Defaults.props and Microsoft.Cpp.props.props in C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\V120.