Htykuut

I am working on a C# app, the contents of it I guess do not matter. Basically, I often use Save/OpenFileDialogs in it. And I use an initial dir property, to make it more convenient, and I set it to the current working directory.

When I have a release build, I pack my application and have all the dirs inside, so it works well. But when I actually debug it in Visual Studio I want to set the working directory which is different from bin/Debug. And so I did. I wrote a literal path, like C:SomethingblahxyzworkingDir. And it works. The problem is I have two machines that I am working on, and this path won't work on the other machine.

I know about the macros like $(ProjectDir) in Visual Studio, so I wanted to use them. Unfortunately when I type i.e. $(ProjectDir) in here:

I get this error:

Do you guys know what may be the issue? I thought this is actually a valid macro, according to the MSDN

It doesn't appear that you can apply this macro in that dialog. Leave the value blank and go to the directory for the solution, drill down into the folder for the project and you should see [ProjectName].csproj

Add the following StartWorkingDirectory setting to to the PropertyGroup for the Debug config.

The property group is:

<PropertyGroup Condition="'$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Debug|AnyCPU'">

And add:

<StartWorkingDirectory>$(ProjectDir)</StartWorkingDirectory>

So it ends up looking like:

<PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Debug|AnyCPU' ">

    <PlatformTarget>AnyCPU</PlatformTarget>

    <DebugSymbols>true</DebugSymbols>

    <DebugType>full</DebugType>

    <Optimize>false</Optimize>

    <OutputPath>binDebug</OutputPath>

    <StartWorkingDirectory>$(ProjectDir)</StartWorkingDirectory>

    <DefineConstants>DEBUG;TRACE</DefineConstants>

    <ErrorReport>prompt</ErrorReport>

    <WarningLevel>4</WarningLevel>

</PropertyGroup>

The value still won't show up in the dialog, but if you use the working directory in your program, the value will be correct.

You cannot use that (valid) macro for that field as Visual Studio does not apply macros there. What makes me believe that is that it seems to be interpreting what you entered literally.

You might be better off by doing something in the code itself to use the project directory. If so, you may want to check to see if the debugger is attached, at least for the purposes of development and "convenience" (e.g. Debugger.IsAttached) and then get the CodeBase property of the executing assembly or the CurrentDirectory. That gives you the convenience you're looking for while debugging. For production, of course, you might want a different strategy.