I have some important questions on the backburner but first I have a question of interest.  When using Visual Studio 2015 with C++  there are predefined environmental variables such as $SolutionDir  that are used for the build.  I have searched long and hard to no avail.  I am trying to modify these in a simple way.  I moved my file structure and although it did work relatively (which is great)  the build still mentions the old folders' names that were named before the change to the next project.

Thank you,

Josheir

Edit: If it helps they are also called macros.

13 minutes ago, LorenzoGatti said:

I recommend to avoid hacking VS projects and solutions; they are strongly intended to be managed automatically by Visual Studio.
If you have symptoms of corruption, such as obsolete directory names surviving a solution rename, you should probably reconstruct the solution and projects from scratch.

Can you explain the complications you are adding to normal project building? You shouldn't need to use special variables.

Sure, it's something like this:

1>c:\latest\win32project10\win32project10\file.cpp(293)
1>  Win32Project10.vcxproj -> C:\latest hear it\Win32Project10\Debug\Project.exe
1>  Win32Project10.vcxproj -> C:\latest hear it\Win32Project10\Debug\Project.pdb (Full PDB)

Notice there are the unwanted:     Win32Project10

(six to be exact.)

It runs okay, I'm trying to make it pretty!   

Thank you,

Josheir

Normally Visual Studio will use paths relative to the .sln file, which is represented with the $SolutionDir variable. That directory is generally the root of the project which can be moved freely to any path and is cloned to other machines through version control.

If you look in the project files typically the files are all relative to that directory. Sub-projects use the solution directory, and that means if you copy a sub-project into a new solution it will automatically use their values in the new solution file. Many tools use this to their advantage to allow per-solution configurations as they are used in many different applications.

Visual Studio's tools take steps to ensure the paths are relative, but it is still possible for you to use hard-coded paths or paths based on other elements, such as paths based on environment variables (e.g. environment variable of TOOL_SDK_PATH).

I'd look through your solution files, project files, property sheets, and similar configuration files to find any paths that are not relative.  Then use the IDE itself to remove those paths and re-add them, verifying that it is using a path relative to the solution directory. If for some reason the tools won't make it relative to the solution's root, I'd edit that by hand being careful to verify the tools still recognize the correct path.