MSVC path on windows

[Jeremy DeHaan via Digitalmars-d-learn]

I'm trying to automate a build process for a project of mine, and 
I want to get the path to the MSVC toolchain DMD is using. I 
don't want to hard code any paths that may not work on some 
people's set-ups.

I know there are some environmental variables such as 
VS140COMNTOOLS, VS120COMNTOOLS, etc. Are these reliable to get 
the location for some MSVC toolchain?

I've also thought of parsing the PATH to figure out where dmd is 
installed and extract the info from the sc.ini file. Am I being 
ridiculous?