Visual Studio 2010 always thinks project is out of date but nothing has changed

Question

I have a very similar problem as described here   I also upgraded a mixed solution of C   CLI and C  projects from Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2008 to Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2010  And now in Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2010 one C   CLI project always runs out of date   Even if it has been compiled and linked just before and F5 is hit  the messagebox  The project is out of date  Would you like to build it   appears  This is very annoying because the DLL file is very low-tiered and forces almost all projects of the solution to rebuild   My pdb settings are set to the default value  suggested solution of this problem    Is it possible the get the reason why Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2010 forces a rebuild or thinks a project is up to date   Any other ideas why Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2010 behaves like that

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For Visual Studio Express 2010 only  See other  easier  answers for VS2012  VS2013  etc  To find the missing file s   use info from the article Enable C   project system logging to enable debug logging in Visual Studio and let it just tell you what s causing the rebuild    Open the devenv exe config file  found in  ProgramFiles  Microsoft Visual Studio 10 0 Common7 IDE  or in  ProgramFiles x86   Microsoft Visual Studio 10 0 Common7 IDE    For Express versions the config file is named V Express exe config  Add the following after the  lt  configSections gt  line    lt system diagnostics gt     lt switches gt       lt add name  CPS  value  4    gt     lt  switches gt   lt  system diagnostics gt   Restart Visual Studio Open up DbgView and make sure it s capturing debug output Try to debug  hit F5 in Visual Studio  Search the debug log for any lines of the form      devenv exe Information  0   Project  Bla Bla Dummy vcxproj  not up to date because build input  Bla Bla SomeFile h  is missing     I just hit Ctrl F and searched for not up to date  These will be the references causing the project to be perpetually  out of date     To correct this  either remove any references to the missing files from your project  or update the references to indicate their actual locations   Note  If using 2012 or later then the snippet should be    lt system diagnostics gt     lt switches gt      lt add name  CPS  value  Verbose    gt     lt  switches gt   lt  system diagnostics gt

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There are quite a few potential reasons and - as noted - you need to first diagnose them by setting MSBuild verbosity to  Diagnostic   Most of the time the stated reason would be self explanatory and you d be able to act on it immediatelly  BUT occasionally MSBuild would erroneously claim that some files are modified and need to be copied   If that is the case  you d need to either disable NTFS tunneling or duplicate your output folder to a new location   Here it is in more words

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I had this problem in VS2013  Update 5  and there can be two reasons for that  both of which you can find by enabling  Detailed  build output under  Tools -  Projects and Solutions -  Build and Run      Forcing recompile of all source files due to missing PDB       This happens when you disable debug information output in your compiler options  Under Project settings     C C     -    Debug Information Format    to    None    and    Linker   -    Generate Debug Info    to    No        If you have left    C C     -    Program Database File Name    at the default  which is      IntDir vc  PlatformToolsetVersion  pdb      VS will not find the file due to a bug  https   connect microsoft com VisualStudio feedback details 833494 project-with-debug-information-disabled-always-rebuilds   To fix it  simply clear the file name to     empty field    Forcing rebuild of all source files due to a change in the command line since the last build   This seems to be a known VS bug too  https   connect microsoft com VisualStudio feedback details 833943 forcing-rebuild-of-all-source-files-due-to-a-change-in-the-command-line-since-the-last-build  and seems to be fixed in newer versions  but not VS2013   I known of no workaround  but if you do  by all means  post it here

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I had this problem and found this   http   curlybrace blogspot com 2005 11 visual-c-project-continually-out-of html     Visual C   Project continually out-of-date  winwlm h macwin32 h rpcerr h macname1 h missing       Problem       In Visual C    Net 2003  one of my projects always claimed to be out of date  even though nothing had changed and no errors had been reported in the last build       Opening the BuildLog htm file for the corresponding project showed a list of PRJ0041 errors for these files  none of which appear on my system anywhere    winwlm h macwin32 h rpcerr h macname1 h       Each error looks something like this     MyApplication   warning PRJ0041   Cannot find missing dependency  macwin32 h  for file  MyApplication rc           Your project may still build  but may continue to appear out of date until this file is found       Solution       Include afxres h instead of resource h inside the project s  rc file       The project s  rc file contained   include resource h   Since the resource compiler does not honor preprocessor  ifdef blocks  it will tear through and try to find include files it should be ignoring  Windows h contains many such blocks  Including afxres h instead fixed the PRJ0041 warnings and eliminated the  Project is out-of-date  error dialog

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Another one on Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2015 SP3  but I have encountered a similar issue on Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2013 a few years back   My issue was that somehow a wrong cpp file was used for precompiled headers  so I had two cpp files that created the precompiled headers   Now why did Visual Studio change the flags on the wrong cpp to  create precompiled headers  without my request I have no clue  but it did happen    maybe some plugin or something     Anyway  the wrong cpp file includes the version h file which is changed on every build  So Visual Studio rebuilds all headers and because of that the whole project   Well  now it s back to normal behavior

User · Answer

The accepted answer helped me on the right path to figuring out how to solve this problem for the screwed up project I had to start working with  However  I had to deal with a very large number of bad include headers  With the verbose debug output  removing one caused the IDE to freeze for 30 seconds while outputting debug spew  which made the process go very slowly   I got impatient and wrote a quick-and-dirty Python script to check the  Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2010  project files for me and output all the missing files at once  along with the filters they re located in  You can find it as a Gist here  https   gist github com antiuniverse 3825678  or this fork that supports relative paths   Example   D      gt  check inc py sdk src game client swarm sdk client vcxproj  Header Files     fx cs blood h    cstrike fx cs blood h    hud radar h    cstrike hud radar h   Game Shared Header Files     basecsgrenade projectile h       shared cstrike basecsgrenade projectile h    fx cs shared h       shared cstrike fx cs shared h    weapon flashbang h       shared cstrike weapon flashbang h    weapon hegrenade h       shared cstrike weapon hegrenade h    weapon ifmsteadycam h       shared weapon ifmsteadycam h   Source Files Swarm GameUI - Embedded Base GameUI Headers     basepaenl h    swarm gameui basepaenl h          Source code      c Python32 python exe import sys import os import os path import xml etree ElementTree as ET  ns     http   schemas microsoft com developer msbuild 2003     Works with relative path also projectFileName   sys argv 1   if not os path isabs projectFileName      projectFileName   os path join os getcwd    projectFileName   filterTree   ET parse projectFileName   filters   filterRoot   filterTree getroot   filterDict   dict   missingDict   dict    for inc in filterRoot iter ns  ClInclude        incFileRel   inc get  Include       incFilter   inc find ns  Filter       if incFileRel    None and incFilter    None          filterDict incFileRel    incFilter text         if incFilter text not in missingDict              missingDict incFilter text        projTree   ET parse projectFileName  projRoot   projTree getroot    for inc in projRoot iter ns  ClInclude        incFileRel   inc get  Include       if incFileRel    None          incFile   os path abspath os path join os path dirname projectFileName   incFileRel           if not os path exists incFile               missingDict filterDict incFileRel   append incFileRel   for  missingGroup  missingList  in missingDict items        if len missingList   gt  0          print     missingGroup               for missing in missingList              print        os path basename missing             missing

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I m using Visual Studio 2013 Professional with Update 4 but didn t find resolution with any of the other suggestions  however  I did manage to resolve the issue for my Team project   Here s what I did to cause the problem -    Created a new class object  Project -  Add Class  Renamed the file via Solution Explorer and clicked yes when asked if I wanted to automatically rename all references to match   Here s what I did to solve the problem -    Go to Team Explorer Home Click Source Control Explorer Drill into the folder where all of the class project files are Found the ORIGINAL filename in the list and deleted it via right-click Build   If this is the case for you then just be extra sure that you re deleting the phantom file rather than the actual one you want to keep in the project

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We also ran into this issue and found out how to resolve it   The issue was as stated above  The file no longer exists on the disk    This is not quite correct  The file does exist on the disk  but the  VCPROJ file is referencing the file somewhere else   You can  discover  this by going to the  include file view  and clicking on each include file in turn until you find the one that Visual Studio can not find  You then ADD that file  as an existing item  and delete the reference that can not be found and everything is OK   A valid question is  How can Visual Studio even build if it does not know where the include files are   We think the  vcproj file has some relative path to the offending file somewhere that it does not show in the Visual Studio GUI  and this accounts for why the project will actually build even though the tree-view of the includes is incorrect

User · Answer

Another simple solution referenced by Visual Studio Forum   Changing configuration  menu Tools   Options   Projects and Solutions   VC   Project Settings   Solution Explorer Mode to Show all files   Then you can see all files in Solution Explorer   Find the files marked by the yellow icon and remove them from the project   It s OK

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I m on Visual Studio 2013 and just updated to the Windows 10 May 2019 update and compiling suddenly had to be redone every time  regardless of changes  Tried renaming the pch to ProjectName instead of TargetName  looked for missing files with the detailed log and that Python script  but in the end it was my time was not synced with MS s servers  by like milliseconds    What resolved this for me was    Adjust date and time  in the control panel  Sync Now    Now my projects don t need to be recompiled for no reason

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For me it was the presence of a non-existing  header file on  Header Files  inside the project  After removing this entry  right-click   Exclude from Project  first time recompiled  then directly              Build  0 succeeded  0 failed  5 up-to-date  0 skipped             and no attempt of rebuilding without modification was done  I think is a check-before-build implemented by VS2010  not sure if documented  could be  which triggers the  AlwaysCreate  flag

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I had a similar problem  but in my case there were no files missing  there was an error in how the pdb output file was defined  I forgot the suffix  pdb  I found out with the debug logging trick    To solve the problem I changed  in the vxproj file  the following line    lt ProgramDataBaseFileName gt MyName lt  ProgramDataBaseFileName gt    to   lt ProgramDataBaseFileName gt MyName pdb lt  ProgramDataBaseFileName gt

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If you change the Debugging Command arguments for the project  this will also trigger the project needs to be rebuilt message  Even though the target itself is not affected by the Debugging arguments  the project properties have changed  If you do rebuild though  the message should disappear

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Visual Studio 2013 --  Forcing recompile of all source files due to missing PDB   I turned on detailed build output to locate the issue  I enabled  Detailed  build output under  Tools     Projects and Solutions     Build and Run    I had several projects  all C    I set the option for under project settings   C C     Debug Information Format  to Program Database   Zi  for the problem project  However  this did not stop the problem for that project  The problem came from one of the other C   projects in the solution   I set all C   projects to  Program Database   Zi    This fixed the problem   Again  the project reporting the problem was not the problem project  Try setting all projects to  Program Database   Zi   to fix the problem

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If you are using the command-line MSBuild command  not the Visual Studio IDE   for example if you are targetting AppVeyor or you just prefer the command line  you can add this option to your MSBuild command line    fileLoggerParameters LogFile MyLog log Append Verbosity diagnostic Encoding UTF-8   As documented here  warning  usual MSDN verbosity   When the build finishes  search for the string will be compiled in the log file created during the build  MyLog log

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I had a similar issue with Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2005  and my solution consisted of five projects in the following dependency  first built at top    Video Codec depends on nothing Generic Graphics depends on Video Codec SpecificAPI Graphics depends on Generic Graphics Engine depends on Specific Graphics Application depends on Engine    I was finding that the Video Codec project wanted a full build even after a full clean then rebuild of the solution   I fixed this by ensuring the pdb output file of both the C C   and linker matched the location used by the other working projects  I also switched RTTI on

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The  NET projects are always recompiled regardless  Part of this is to keep the IDE up to date  such as IntelliSense   I remember asking this question on an Microsoft forum years ago  and this was the answer I was given

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I spent many hours spent tearing out my hair over this  The build output wasn t consistent  different projects would be  not up to date  for different reasons from one build to the next consecutive build  I eventually found that the culprit was DropBox  3 0 4   I junction my source folder from     DropBox into my projects folder  not sure if this is the reason   but DropBox somehow  touches  files during a build  Paused syncing and everything is consistently up-to-date

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In Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2012 I was able to achieve the same result easier than in the accepted solution   I changed the option in menu Tools   Options   Projects and Solutions   Build and Run    MSBuild project build output verbosity  from Minimal to Diagnostic   Then in the build output I found the same lines by searching for  not up to date       Project  blabla  is not up to date  Project item  c  foo bar xml  has  Copy to Output Directory  attribute set to  Copy always

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In my case one of the projects contains multiple IDL files  The MIDL compiler generates a DLL data file called  dlldata c  for each of them  regardless of the IDL file name  This caused Visual Studio to compile the IDL files on every build  even without changes to any of the IDL files   The workaround is to configure a unique output file for each IDL file  the MIDL compiler always generates such a file  even if the  dlldata switch is omitted     Right-click the IDL file Select Properties - MIDL - Output Enter a unique file name for the DllData File property

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I had similar problem and followed the above instructions  the accepted answer  to locate the missing files  but not without scratching my head  Here is my summary of what I did  To be accurate these are not missing files since they are not required by the project to build  at least in my case   but they are references to files that don t exist on disk which are not really required   Here is my story    Under Windows nbsp 7 the file is located at  ProgramFiles x86   Microsoft Visual Studio 10 0 Common7 IDE    There are two similar files devenv exe config config and devenv exe config  You want to change later one  Under Windows nbsp 7  you don t have permission to edit this file being in program files  Just copy it somewhere else  desktop  change it and than copy it back to the program files location  I was trying to figure out how to connect DebugView to the IDE to see the missing files  Well  you don t have to do anything  Just run it  and it will capture all the messages  Make sure Capture Events menu option is selected in Capture menu which by default should be selected  DebugView will NOT display all the missing files at once  at least it didn t for me   You would have DebugView running and than run the project in Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2010  It will prompt the project out of date message  select Yes to build and DebugView will show the first file that is missing or causing the rebuild  Open the project file  not solution file  in Notepad and search for that file and delete it  You are better off closing your project and reopening it again while doing this delete  Repeat this process until DebugView no longer shows any files missing  It s kind of helpful to set the message filter to not up to date from the DebugView toolbar button or Edit   Filter Highlight option  That way the only messages it displays are the one that has  not up to date  string in it    I had lots of files that were unnecessary references and removing them all fixed the issue following the above steps   Second way to find all the missing files at once  There is a second way to find these files all at once  but it involves  a  source control and  b  integration of it with Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2010  Using Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2010  add your project to a desired location or dummy location in source control  It will try to add all the files  including those that don t exist on disk as well but referenced in the project file  Go to your source control software like Perforce  and it should mark these files which don t exist on disk in a different color scheme  Perforce shows them with a black lock on them  These are your missing references  Now you have a list of them all  and you can delete all of them from your project file using Notepad and your project would not complain about being out of date

User · Answer

For me  the problem arose in a WPF project where some files had their  Build Action  property set to  Resource  and their  Copy to Output Directory  set to  Copy if newer   The solution seemed to be to change the  Copy to Output Directory  property to  Do not copy    msbuild knows not to copy  Resource  files to the output - but still triggers a build if they re not there  Maybe that could be considered a bug   It s hugely helpful with the answers here hinting how to get msbuild to spill the beans on why it keeps building everything

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I met this problem today  however it was a bit different  I had a CUDA DLL project in my solution  Compiling in a clean solution was OK  but otherwise it failed and the compiler always treated the CUDA DLL project as not up to date   I tried the solution from this post   But there is no missing header file in my solution  Then I found out the reason in my case   I have changed the project s Intermediate Directory before  although it didn t cause trouble  And now when I changed the CUDA DLL Project s Intermediate Directory back to   Configuration    everything works right again   I guess there is some minor problem between CUDA Build Customization and non-default Intermediate Directory

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I don t know if anyone else has this same problem  but my project s properties had  Configuration Properties  - gt  C C   - gt   Debug Information Format  set to  None   and when I switched it back to the default  Program Database   Zi    that stopped the project from recompiling every time

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I think that you placed some newline or other whitespace  Remove it and press F5 again

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This happened to me today  I was able to track down the cause  The project included a header file which no longer existed on disk   Removing the file from the project solved the problem

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I ve deleted a cpp and some header files from the solution  and from the disk  but still had the problem   Thing is  every file the compiler uses goes in a   tlog file in your temp directory   When you remove a file  this   tlog file is not updated  That s the file used by incremental builds to check if your project is up to date   Either edit this  tlog file manually or clean your project and rebuild

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I had a VC   project that was always compiling all files and had been previously upgraded from VS2005 to VS2010  by other people   I found that all cpp files in the project except StdAfx cpp were set to Create   Yc  the precompiled header   I changed this so that only StdAfx cpp was set to create the precompiled header and the rest were set to Use   Yu  the precompiled header and this fixed the problem for me

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This happened to me multiple times and then went away  before I could figure out why  In my case it was   Wrong system time in the dual boot setup   Turns out  my dual boot with Ubuntu was the root cause   I ve been too lazy to fix up Ubuntu to stop messing with my hardware clock  When I log into Ubuntu  the time jumps 5 hours forward    Out of bad luck  I built the project once  with the wrong system time  then corrected the time  As a result  all the build files had wrong timestamps  and VS would think they are all out of date and would rebuild the project

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Most build systems use data time stamps to determine when rebuilds should happen - the date time stamp of any output files is checked against the last modified time of the dependencies - if any of the dependencies are fresher  then the target is rebuilt   This can cause problems if any of the dependencies somehow get an invalid data time stamp as it s difficult for the time stamp of any build output to ever exceed the timestamp of a file supposedly created in the future  P

[visual-studio] Visual Studio 2010 always thinks project is out of date, but nothing has changed

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