I did try the Visual C++ Build Tools 2015 on a test build machine and it seems to work with my C++ solutions, but it is a pre-release and not meant for production. I need something that will work for production, so I have installed Microsoft Build Tools 2015, Windows 10 SDK, and Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 and copied some of the files that are listed under Build Server lists.
The builds on the machine using the pre-release tools use "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\bin\x86_amd64\CL.exe" when running MSBuild and the build completes, but my other machine uses just "CL.exe" when called with the same code and gives the error TRK0005: Failed to locate: "CL.exe". Clearly there is some kind of problem with environment variables being applied to the call to MSBuild, but I'm not sure where to look next. The system variables are the same on both machines, so something else is telling the machine with the pre-release tools where to find this path for CL.exe.
Any help would be appreciated.
Note: In case it helps, running CL.exe from a command prompt, I get an error saying it can't start because VCRUNTIME140.dll is missing. It is there in the System32 folder, which is in my Path.
And if I try to use vcvarsall.bat, it claims it can't find Common Tools.