Energizer Project: Keeps Building and Building

Michael Geary — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 23:37:53 +0000

Did you ever have a Visual C++ project that won’t stop building? It builds OK, but if you start the debugger or do another Ctrl+Shift+B, it says it’s out of date and wants to build again? Every time?

This happened to me and I was stumped. There was nothing in the Output window to tell me what was wrong. It looked like a perfectly successful build:

------ Build started: Project: Test,
Configuration: Debug Win32 ------

Compiling resources...
Linking...

Build log was saved at
"file://c:\Test\Debug\BuildLog.htm"
Test - 0 error(s), 0 warning(s)

-------------- Done --------------

    Build: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 skipped

The only problem was it compiled those resources every time. It never thought they were up to date.

I tried some Google searches. Nothing. This was annoying me, and the rest of my team.

Finally, out of sheer frustration, I Ctrl+clicked on that “Build log” link, like the helpful tooltip suggested.

Oh. Now it tells me:

Compiling resources...
Linking...

Test : warning PRJ0041 : Cannot find missing
dependency 'ICON_FILE' for file 'Test.rc'.
Your project may still build, but may
continue to appear out of date until this
file is found.

That gives me a desperately needed clue. Looking at Test.rc, I see that I’d coded:

#ifdef DEMO

#define ICON_FILE "Icons\Demo.ico"

#else

#define ICON_FILE "Icons\Full.ico"

#endif

1 ICON DISCARDABLE ICON_FILE

Well, it sounded like a good idea at the time, honest.

The resource compiler has no problem with this, but apparently the dependency checker can’t handle it.

Changing it to this fixed it:

#ifdef DEMO

1 ICON DISCARDABLE "Icons\Demo.ico"

#else

1 ICON DISCARDABLE "Icons\Full.ico"

#endif

The Moral:

The information you need may be hiding behind a link. Just because the Output window has always told you about build problems doesn’t mean it will tell you today.
If your product has an Output window that almost always provides complete information, fix it so it always does.

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Energizer Project: Keeps Building and Building