How do I set specific environment variables when debugging in Visual Studio

Question

On a class library project  I set the  Start Action  on the Debug tab of the project properties to  Start external program   NUnit in this case   I want to set an environment variable in the environment this program is started in  How do I do that   Is it even possible    EDIT   It s an environment variable that influences all  NET applications  COMplus Version  it sets the runtime version  so setting it system wide really isn t an option   As a workaround I just forced NUnit to start in right  NET version  2 0  by setting it in nunit exe config  though unfortunately this also means all my  NET 1 1 unit tests are now also run in  NET 2 0  I should probably just make a copy of the executable so it can have its own configuration file      I am keeping the question open  not accepting an answer  in case someone does happen to find out how  it might be useful for other purposes too after all

User · Answer

Starting with NUnit 2 5 you can use  framework switch e g    nunit-console myassembly dll  framework net-1 1   This is from NUnit s help pages

User · Answer

As environments are inherited from the parent process  you could write an add-in for Visual Studio that modifies its environment variables before you perform the start  I am not sure how easy that would be to put into your process

User · Answer

In Visual Studio for Mac and C  you can use   Environment SetEnvironmentVariable   lt Variable name gt      lt Value gt      But you will need the following namespace  using System Collections    you can check the full list of variables with this   foreach  DictionaryEntry de in Environment GetEnvironmentVariables                Console WriteLine     0     1    de Key  de Value

User · Answer

You can set it at Property   Configuration Properties   Debugging   Environment

User · Answer

If you can t use bat files to set up your environment  then your only likely option is to set up a system wide environment variable   You can find these by doing   Right click  My Computer  Select properties Select the  advanced  tab Click the  environment variables  button In the  System variables  section  add the new environment variable that you desire  Ok  all the way out to accept your changes   I don t know if you d have to restart visual studio  but seems unlikely   HTH

User · Answer

Visual Studio 2003 doesn t seem to allow you to set environment variables for debugging   What I do in C C   is use  putenv   in main   and set any variables  Usually I surround it with a  if defined DEBUG MODE    endif to make sure only certain builds have it    putenv  MYANSWER 42      I believe you can do the same thing with C  using os putenv    i e   os putenv  MYANSWER    42      These will set the envrironment variable for that shell process only  and as such is an ephemeral setting  which is what you are looking for   By the way  its good to use process explorer  http   technet microsoft com en-us sysinternals bb896653 aspx   which is a sysinternals tool  You can see what a given process  copy of the environment variables is  so you can validate that what you set is what you got

User · Answer

In Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2008 and Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2005 at least  you can specify changes to environment variables in the project settings   Open your project  Go to Project -  Properties     Under Configuration Properties -  Debugging  edit the  Environment  value to set environment variables   For example  if you want to add the directory  c  foo bin  to the path when debugging your application  set the  Environment  value to  PATH  PATH  c  foo bin

User · Answer

Set up a batch file which you can invoke  Pass the path the batch file  and have the batch file set the environment variable and then invoke NUnit

[visual-studio] How do I set specific environment variables when debugging in Visual Studio?

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