C++ #include is not found

Question

When I compile my C++ program in Visual Studio Express it says that it can\'t find atlbase.h. Am I missing some SDK or something?

Answer 1

Situation

With Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition, we installed "Visual C++ ATL support" and MFC and ATL support. The error still occurred in our x64 project.

Solution

We fixed some paths with the following two commands:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC>mklink /d atlmfc "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.11.25503\atlmfc"
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.11.25503\atlmfc\lib>mklink /d amd64 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.11.25503\atlmfc\lib\x64

Details

We eventually found the header atlbase.h in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.11.25503\atlmfc\include. This path simply was not added to the VC Include directory by vsvars32.bat, so the header was not found during build.

vsvars32.bat includes the following line:

@if exist "%VCINSTALLDIR%ATLMFC\INCLUDE" set INCLUDE=%VCINSTALLDIR%ATLMFC\INCLUDE;%INCLUDE%`.

This resolved to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\atlmfc\include in our machine.

We created a directory junction, so the build tool finds atlbase.h in the expected directory (this is the first command from the Solution section above):

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC>mklink /d atlmfc "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.11.25503\atlmfc"

Afterwards, the linker did not find atls.lib (see Cannot Open File atls.lib). This was due to the expected file structure was that lib should directly contain the x86 version of the libs and lib\amd64 should contain the x64 variants. Instead, lib\x86 contained the x86 versions and lib\x64 contained the 64 bit versions. Since we build a 64 bit project, creating another directory junk from amd64 to x64 solved the problem:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.11.25503\atlmfc\lib>mklink /d amd64 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.11.25503\atlmfc\lib\x64