Visual Studio Project out of date

Question

I\'ve been trying to get Visual C++ working, but I\'m getting this error when building every project: \"This project is out of date\" \"Would you like to build it?\" It fail

Answer 1

You should let Visual Studio tell you why it needs to rebuild. Visual Studio 2015 has built in support for this:

• Tools (menu)
• Options
• Project and Solution
• Build and Run

Change MSBuild project build output verbosity to Detailed or Diagnostics.

In my case it printed a message like this:

1>------ Up-To-Date check: Project: xyz, Configuration: xyz ------
1>Project not up to date because build input 'C:\ws\Missing.h' is missing.

... and removing that header from the project fixed the problem.

To get this information in older Visual Studio versions, you need to use DebugView and modify devenv.exe.config (see Colin Smith's answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/21759835/1941779). Note that this solution does NOT work for Visual Studio 2015.