Visual C++ 2010: How To Fix The "Up-to-date Project Always Gets Rebuilt" Problem

Sometimes when you hit F5 or F7, Visual Studio acts as if something has changed in your project and rebuilds it, even immediately after a fresh rebuild. This might be very annoying and time-consuming, especially when debugging big projects. I'll try to summarize what can be done to eliminate this problem.

It's all about the new MSBuild build system. Something is fooling it and instead of seeing in the build output window a message like this:

========== Build: 0 succeeded, 0 failed, 1 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========

you always see this:

========== Build: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========

The following can be done then:

• Check your project settings regarding the intermediate output directory. If you have more than one project in your solution, no two projects can share the same intermediate output directory. No manually placed files should reside in this directory and no manual corrections to automatically generated files should be made. This directory should be exclusively under Visual Studio's control. Try to "Clean" the project or the entire solution using Visual Studio's command and then test the build behavior. If no luck then try to clean the directory manually and test again.

• Your project might reference a non-existent file. MSBuild's up-to-date check mechanism will assume that a new build is required. Try to locate and remove non-existent files from the project.

• Your project is converted from a project of a previous Visual Studio's version. And your project somehow became "broken". It also can "break" in some other mysterious ways during "normal use", even if it's not a conversion project. The cure is to re-create the project from scratch, despite how dull and tedious it may sound.

I personally encountered all the three above situations and managed to solve the problem. If you have something else to say regarding this topic please let me know.