Visual Studio can t see my included header files

Question

I created an empty  Demo  project in Visual Studio 2008 and added some existing projects to my solution  Included  MyHeader h   other project s header  in main cpp file which is in  Demo   Also added header files  path in  Tools Option VC   Directories Include files  section  But intellisense says   File  MyHeader h  not found in current source file s directory or in build system paths      How the problem can be fixed  Thanks

User · Answer

This happened to me just now  after shutting down and restarting the computer  Eventually I realised that the architecture had somehow been changed to ARM from x64

User · Answer

I know this is an older question  but none of the above answers worked for me  In my case  the issue turned out to be that I had absolute include paths but without drive letters  Compilation was fine  but Visual Studio couldn t find an include file when I right-clicked and tried to open it  Adding the drive letters to my include paths corrected the problem    I would never recommend hard-coding drive letters in any aspect of your project files  either use relative paths  macros  environment variables  or some mix of the tree for any permanent situation  However  in this case  I m working in some temporary projects where absolute paths were necessary in the short term  Not being able to right-click to open the files was extremely frustrating  and hopefully this will help others

User · Answer

I encountered this issue  but the solutions provided didn t directly help me  so I m sharing how I got myself into a similar situation and temporarily resolved it   I created a new project within an existing solution and copy  amp  pasted the Header and CPP file from another project within that solution that I needed to include in my new project through the IDE  Intellisense displayed an error suggesting it could not resolve the reference to the header file and compiling the code failed with the same error too   After reading the posts here  I checked the project folder with Windows File Explorer and only the main cpp file was found  For some reason  my copy and paste of the header file and CPP file were just a reference   I assume  and did not physically copy the file into the new project file   I deleted the files from the Project view within Visual Studio and I used File Explorer to copy the files that I needed to the project folder directory  I then referenced the other solutions posted here to  include files in project  by showing all files and this resolved the problem   It boiled down to the files not being physically in the Project folder directory even though they were shown correctly within the IDE   Please Note I understand duplicating code is not best practice and my situation is purely a learning hobby project   It s probably in my best interest and anyone else who ended up in a similar situation to use the IDE project Solution setup correctly when reusing code from other projects - I m still learning and I ll figure this out one day

User · Answer

If the visual studio says that you miss some file in the current source file folder  there is one solution that i used  Just right click the file you want to add and choose Open Document  if it really doesn t exist  then you should see something like cannot find file in the source file path    somewhere in your computer   then what you could do is the add your source file into that path first and see if it works

User · Answer

In my experience  with VS2010  when include files can t be found at compile time  doing a clean  then build usually fixes the problem  It s not that rare for the editor to be able to open an include file and then the compiler to announce that it can t find that very file  even when it is open on the screen

User · Answer

Try adding the header file to your project s files   right click on project -  add existing file

User · Answer

If you choose Project and then All Files in the menu  all files should be displayed in the Solution Explorer that are physically in your project map  but not  yet  included in your project  If you right click on the file you want to add in the Solution Explorer  you can include it

User · Answer

If it is the case that only the IDE indicates that it cannot find included files  but compiling is successful  the issue is simply that IntelliSense is not fully up to date with recent changes  This can happen specifically when including existing projects  in my own experience  Deleting the  sdf file    IntelliSense database  that is generated in your solution directory forces Visual Studio to regenerate it  so that it is up to date again  Just doing a  clean  will probably do the same thing  but takes more time since everything will be generated again then

User · Answer

Delete the  sdf file that is in your solution directory  It s just the Intellisense database  and Visual Studio will recreate it the next time you open that solution  This db can get corrupted and cause the IDE to not be able to find things  and since the compiler generates this information for itself on the fly  it wouldn t be affected

User · Answer

Here s how I solved this problem    Go to Project --  Show All Files       Right click all the files in Solutions Explorer and Click on Include in Project in all the files you want to include      Done

[c++] Visual Studio can't 'see' my included header files

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