This is a really off-the-wall thing. But if there is a way to do this, then the Empegbbs will be able to find it. If we can't find it, it doesn't exist, right?

Each time a developer in the company sets up a new install of Visual Studio on a new machine, and then connects to Team Foundation Server (TFS) to connect to the source code tree and synch up to the latest source code, she can choose where on her hard disk to store that source code, even possibly inventing a new directory in the process.

Maybe she puts it in c:\Source\ or maybe in c:\Development, or maybe in C:\Projects, or maybe she took the default settings and put it in c:\users\HerUserName\Source\Workspaces\ProjectName. My point is, everyone on the team will have that source code located in a different hard disk folder, depending on whose dev machine you're looking at. It's completely arbitrary.

Yet Visual Studio, and especially its plugins for Team Foundation Server, have no trouble automatically finding this location once it's been established. So that location must be stored in a config somewhere.

Does anyone know where this is stored? I have some utilities which run "outside" the Visual Studio environment, but they need to act upon files found within that source code tree, and I don't want the utilities to have to prompt the user for the location of those source code files.

In cases where a relative path from within the development tree works, I have made them work that way. But some of these run completely outside that structure and I want them to discover where the top of that structure exists.

Any ideas?

I've looked for an existing environment variable for this and there doesn't seem to be one.