Fatal error: “No Target Architecture” in Visual Studio

Question

When I try to compile my c++ project using Visual Studio 2010 in either Win32 or x64 mode I get the following error:

>C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft SDK

Answer 1

It would seem that _AMD64_ is not defined, since I can't imagine you are compiling for Itanium (_IA64_).

Answer 2

If you are building 32bit then make sure you don't have _WIN64 defined for your project.

Answer 3

Another cause of this can be including a header that depends on windows.h, before including windows.h.

In my case I included xinput.h before windows.h and got this error. Swapping the order solved the problem.

Answer 4

Besides causes described already, I received this error because I'd include:

#include <fileapi.h>

Apparently it was not needed (despite of CreateDirectoryW call). After commenting out, compiler was happy. Very strange.

Answer 5

Use #include <windows.h> instead of #include <windef.h>.

From the windows.h wikipedia page:

There are a number of child header files that are automatically included with windows.h. Many of these files cannot simply be included by themselves (they are not self-contained), because of dependencies.

windef.h is one of the files automatically included with windows.h.