I have a Visual Studio 2012 Express solution that consists of a DLL project, two EXE projects, and two "custom build" projects. Whenever I build the solution (press F7 or Debug -> Start Debugging) the IDE thinks it needs to rebuild the DLL project even when there have been no changes.
In the build output I see:
1>------ Build started: Project: myDLL, Configuration: Debug Win32 ------
1> myDLL.vcxproj -> E:\myApp\Debug\myDLL.dll
========== Build: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 4 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========
There are no compilations and no linking. The timestamp on the output files (DLL, EXP, ILK, LIB, and PDB) do not change.
The only thing that happens is that my pre-build event is triggered and this causes problems with my build number counter.
I have read these two document that seem to offer a way to find out what is happening:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsproject/archive/2009/07/21/enable-c-project-system-logging.aspx
However, I can't find the file mentioned (devenv.exe.config). Is this file not present in Express versions of Visual Studio?
Is there any other way to find out why Visual Studio thinks it need to rebuild this project? Perhaps it expects an output file to be somewhere and the linker puts it somewhere else? Anything else to look for?
Norm