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At the start I'd like to note that I've spent some time researching this issue and suggested solutions for similar questions like this one didn't help me.

Problem background

I need to migrate a Firebreath plugin project (which I haven't worked on previously) from PC_1 to PC_2.

As far as I'm aware the project was started on PC_1 on Visual Studio 2010 and later moved to Visual Studio 2013 Pro. There's one solution consisting of 19 projects. I have an instruction which says that in order to get the plugin installer I should first Build project_x and after that Build project_y_WiXInstall. Both steps work without any issues on this machine.

Then there's PC_2 which had Visual Studio 2015 Community installed before I started working on it. I've removed it, installed Visual Studio 2013 Pro (version 12.0.21005.1 REL - exactly the same as on PC_1), moved all of the needed files and I'm trying to get rid of all of the compilation errors. So far I figured out I had to install Cmake 2.8, Windows Driver Toolkit 7.1 and manually override an incorrect VCTargetsPath MSBuild variable

Problem description

Currently when I try to compile the project on the new machine I get these two errors (this is an image link since I can't embed images yet on this account). I'm not sure what's going on with the first error message since it looks incomplete and the file CUSTOMBUILD doesn't exist, but I'm not bothered by it too much since the previous compilation error I fixed also had a similar "artifact" as the first error and it disappeared after fixing the second one.

The covered part of the second error message is the project path. The error origin (Microsoft.Cpp.Platform.targets file, line 64) looks like this:

<!-- Error out if toolset does not exists in Visual Studio 2010 or 2012 -->
<VCMessage Code="MSB8020" Type="Error" Arguments="$(_CurrentPlatformToolsetShortName);$(PlatformToolset)" Condition="'$(ToolsetTargetsFound)' != 'true'" />

What didn't help

  1. The error description suggests using an Upgrade Solution... option, but there's no such thing when I right-click the solution
  2. As an accepted answer for the question I've posted at the start of my post suggests, I've checked the Properties of all 19 of my projects (including the project ZERO_CHECK) but their Platform Toolset is already set to Visual Studio 2013 (v120).
  3. I've also tried changing the Platform Toolset to inherit from parent or project defaults for all of the projects. This resulted in it switching to Visual Studio 2010 (v100) (not installed) and after that I've right-clicked on the projects and chose Upgrade VC++ compiler and libraries. After this the Platform Toolset was back to the Visual Studio 2013 (v120) but it didn't help with the compilation error.
  4. As a NON-accepted answer for the question I've posted at the start of my post suggests, I've tried searching for all of the occurrences of 10.0 and V100 in all of my .vcxproj files to replace them but I haven't found any occurrences of them.

[EDIT]

I just got an idea to try building the project with MSBuild from the command line. There's a bit more info compared to errors inside Visual Studio, so maybe it will help with resolving the issue: https://pastebin.com/JhN3dXM3

Pietruszek
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1 Answers1

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So the thing you're missing here is that FireBreath projects are built using CMake -- the actual contents of the build directory should always be completely temporary and never stored in source control. To build the project on a new computer you need to run the prep command again from scratch.

If the previous maintainer changed the build files manually and/or migrated it to a newer version of visual studio without using cmake to do it then they did some very ugly things and all bets are off... good luck.

This is why all the firebreath documentation (I wrote most of it) strongly urges that the build directory be transient and you always do project file updates in cmake.

Hope that helps!

taxilian
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  • Thanks! Removing the contents of the build directory and running the prep script did help and I managed to compile the plugin on the new machine. I'm still having trouble with getting the WiX installer project to generate ("remove the trailing backslash from the environment variable" didn't help me), but it's a separate issue so I'll try to resolve it myself or ask elsewhere. – Pietruszek Sep 25 '18 at 14:03
  • It's very possible that the version of WiX you're trying to use isn't fully supported by firebreath; check wix.cmake in the firebreath source and you might be able to update it to work with newer wix, depending on what has changed -- or you could install the older version of wix – taxilian Sep 25 '18 at 16:00