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I recently built a large-ish open source program in Visual Studio 2013. Initially the build failed due to a couple errors (a C1900 and a LNK2019). These errors were quite puzzling since I was following clear, simple instructions for building the program. The main developer couldn't think of any good reasons why they would occur.

I turned off my laptop overnight and the next morning I reattempted the build with the intention of reproducing the errors. But to my great surprise, no errors. I did not change any of the source or any compiler settings, etc.

Later that day I decided to do another build, and I got the same errors as before. I shut down my laptop for a minute or so, turned it back on, tried building again and it worked.

Clearly this is really strange. I have reason to suspect that there is some faulty hardware in my laptop. Could that cause these mysterious disappearing errors?

62a
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Try this on another machine and see if you get the same results. If you do, you'll know it's not a hardware issue.

It's more probable that you don't have complete build steps provided by the other developer. If he only built/tested it on his computer, then he may have added/installed (and not documented) some other tools/scripts/libraries necessary for a successful build - that he doesn't even remember about. There could also be circular dependencies between the projects which prevent you from building in one step.

You should try and identify the relationships between the projects and then build them separately, until you find where the problem is. You start with those projects not having references on any other ones, and so on. Eventually, you'll find the 'problem' project, and it'll be easier to fix.

Andy
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  • It's a pretty popular program and at least a handful of people are building it on their machines. I don't think it's circular dependencies because it was failing on repeated build attempts at first, then after restarting my machine it would succeed on the first try after clearing out the build folder and starting from scratch. Only two projects get errors, and fortunately none of the others depend on them. In fact I was able to build a mostly-functional program by excluding them. – 62a Jul 16 '17 at 20:32