Manifests with builds that have project dependencies

[Mike Stefanik]

Something that I've run into is when you have a project that uses uses an embedded manifest, and that project references another project as dependency, the build is failing from within VBP. The same project compiles fine within the VS2005 IDE itself. The error being returned is along the lines of:

.\MyProject.tmp_Release_Win32.manifest : general error c1010070: Failed to load and parse the manifest. The system cannot find the file specified.

It looks like what's happening is a temporary project is being created, but for whatever reason, it's not creating a temporary copy of the manifest. The workaround is to remove the dependency from the project and simply make sure that it's built seperately. Apparently when there are no other project dependencies, then it doesn't create that temporary project and it finds the manifest correctly.

Any ideas as to how this could be made to work, or is it just a limitation of how vcbuild does its thing?

[kinook]

It sounds like a VS/MSBuild issue when building the solution from the command-line. You can verify that by checking the 'Show command-line' checkbox on the Options tab of the Make VS.NET action, rebuilding, then copy/pasting the command-line used from the Output pane to a Command Prompt and running there. If you're using MSBuild (the default), you could try selecting/entering 'devenv' in the Override field on that tab to see if it works better.

Here is another possibility:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=657091&SiteID=1

[Mike Stefanik]

Thanks for the tip, selecting 'devenv' as the override resolved the problem. The article in the Microsoft newsgroup that you linked to seemed to be somewhat similar, but not directly related in this case. Looks like it's just a bug in how the command line build works; I noticed when using diagnostic logging that it was saying something about needing to create a temporary project because of an external dependency on another project.