Wednesday 8 March 2017

Development : Visual Studio Giving False Reports of Missing Symbols

I have just run across an issue which has me slightly baffled... Sending the build down to my automated server and it started coming back as failed, panic ensued, so that I started to then do builds on my local Visual Studio instance... (which is VS2013). 

Now, this code is perfectly working, has been fine, released and tested for... Since about 2011.

This is how the error shows up...


Taking a closer look...


We can see there are suddenly a bunch of unresolved externals, specifically the definitions of a bunch of functions.

There is NOTHING wrong with this code, indeed, the work around to get a build to complete is to comment out any one of these functions....


Rebuild, and it now fails on that specifically missing function body.


Finally, re-enable the code and do a further rebuild... and everything completes perfectly...


Consulting the internet about this one, as everyone here has drawn a blank, and one person suggests that this is a miss-match between the Byte set setting of the project (Multi-byte) and any libraries being Unicode.  However, I have no third party libraries... The mystery only deepens.

A full fresh check out of the code, still fails, a full clean fails, a rebuild fails, rebooting the machine has failed.  None of the fixes has made a difference, and more problematic is that the failure happens sporadically.

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