Using the registry to resolve Visual Studio reference paths.

Note: To skip the long journey of what lead me to figuring this out, click here to go to the howto.

Recently I was asked to look at a fiddler plugin Stan, the founder of this blog, was developing. He gave me a SVN path and asked me to build it and test it.

So I checked out the source code and hit F5. I got a bunch of compiler errors relating to the fact that I didn’t have fiddler installed. I rectified that matter and still got errors. The problem was that the hintpath of fiddler.exe was wrong. On my machine, Fiddler is installed in ‘C:\Program Files\Fiddler2\’, while on Stan’s machine it is installed to ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Fiddler2′. I consulted the mighty google, which led me to a stackoverflow question. The question pointed out that you can have multiple hintpaths to an assembly. However, I wanted a better solution. What if someone installed Fiddler to a custom location?

I got the idea of using the registry. Fiddler has an installer. Surely the installer records its install location to the registry. It does in ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fiddler2′ (Apparently fiddler is written by a Microsoft Employee). So the question is how to get MSBuild, the tool that visual studio uses to parse project files, to read a value from the registry.

The answer was found in a post on the MSBuild team blog.

How To

Unfortunately, Visual Studio does not allow you to edit hintpaths to referenced assemblies. So you’re going to have to edit your vcproj or vbproj file in notepad or some other text editor.  Here are the steps:

1. Open the project file in your text editor.
2. Look for the <Reference/> element for fiddler.exe. It should look similar to this:
   

   <Reference Include=”Fiddler, Version=2.2.7.5, Culture=neutral, processorArchitecture=MSIL”>
   
   <SpecificVersion>False</SpecificVersion>
   
   <HintPath>C:\Program Files\Fiddler.exe</HintPath>
   
   <Private>False</Private>
   
   </Reference>
   

3. Change the hintpath as follows:
   

   <Reference Include=”Fiddler, Version=2.2.7.5, Culture=neutral, processorArchitecture=MSIL”>
   <SpecificVersion>False</SpecificVersion>
   <HintPath>$(Registry:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fiddler2@InstallPath)\Fiddler.exe</HintPath>
   <Private>False</Private>
   </Reference>

4. Save the file
5. Visual studio will detect the file change and ask you to reload the file. If you are using SharpDevelop as you’re IDE, you will have to close and reopen the solution.

Thats all there is to it. Happy coding!