Joseph Brill

I apologize in advance for the lack of a more polished and thoughtful response. Time limited today... In a perfect world, adding MSVC_PRODUCT, MSVC_CHANNEL, MSVC_COMPONENT, and MSVC_TOOLSET as user-facing options...

> Is there any way we can do better than what we're doing in how this is exposed to the programmer? We already have MSVC_VERSION and MSVS_VERSION with the latter...

> Let's see if @jcbrill has an update - some testing might be a help, or...? Due to recent PRs accepted and a handful that are under consideration for the...

> it seems like you could hardcode using a preview version using https://github.com/SCons/scons/pull/4125 once that's merged? Yes you could. It has always been possible to use a preview version via...

@bdbaddog Correct. This is still outstanding. Nothing in #4174 was to support this.

All for closing. >So if you give something that's vaguely valid-looking (a string that looks like a number) you at least get the report, though it's in the form of...

Perhaps judiciously placed type checks (e.g., Util.is_String) for `MSVC_VERSION` and `MSVS_VERSION` and possibly malformed (i.e., isn't a supported/expected format) could be helpful. Moving forward, some of the existing code that...

What follows is a simple demonstration of what might be possible. The example below adds a simple verification check to the `get_default_version` method that retrieves the `MSVC_VERSION` and `MSVS_VERSION` variables...

> It doesn't look like MSVUserError is a UserError. Something to chew on, someday. Probably a good idea. It should not be that difficult to either replace or extend the...

Examples with MSVCUserError inheriting from VisualCException and UserError. Minor adjustments to error messages. Better? With MSVC_VERSION=137 ``` scons: Reading SConscript files ... scons: *** Type error (expected 'str', received 'int'):...