I'm running msbuild from the command line with the following:
msbuild mysolution.sln -p:outputdir=c:\mydir
When I run this, the outputdir is being ignored and the default specified in the csproj file is being used.
The MSDN doc for this tool says that I should be able to override the build directory using this parameter. What am I doing wrong?
Note that OutputPath is preferred over OutDir. The documentation used to be wrong about this, but I see that they've finally fixed it.
Beyond that, it's difficult to say exactly what the problem is, since you didn't show the exact path that you're passing as a parameter. There are two possible problems that I can imagine:
The OutputPath option specifies the path to the output directory relative to the project directory. That means you can't set it to a global path like C:\mydir. I assume it is unable to find the path you specified, and so it defaults to the one specified in your project file.
If the path that you're actually specifying as a parameter contains spaces, the command is likely to fail. I believe you need to wrap the path in quotes and append an extra backslash to the end of the path string.