Good day. When setting up a new Win11 dev machine with VS2026 Community Edition I’m running into trouble that cmake doesn’t seem to be able to detect Visual Studio (specifically VS2026) unless it’s running inside the ‘Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt’ environment. This might be a VS2026 specific problem since I’m using cmake 4.x just fine on my other Windows machines with VS2022.
This is when running cmake without generator command line arg in a regular cmd.exe or Powershell instance (e.g. just cmake .. from with a build subdirectory). The error I’m getting is that nmake can’t be found, which I guess is a fallback path when no VStudio instance can be detected.
Is this an intended or accidential regression? If intended then please let me file an official compaint here 
Being able to “just work” outside the VS Developer Commend Prompt is the one feature which makes cmake stand out from the crowd of other build systems (which usually assume all sorts of UNIX-isms even when running on Windows).