Question

After having converted a project from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2010, it appears the project doesn’t build anymore and spits out tons of C2059 errors like:

`error C2059: syntax error : ‘type’

We’re using Visual Studio 2010 Professional which doesn’t provide static code analysis.

Here is the full log for the compilation of 1 C file for reference:

1>------ Build started: Project: VoHR, Configuration: Debug Win32 ------
1>  AKAsynch.c
1>c:\program files (x86)\microsoft visual studio 10.0\vc\include\codeanalysis\sourceannotations.h(88): error C2059: syntax error : 'type'
1>c:\program files (x86)\microsoft visual studio 10.0\vc\include\codeanalysis\sourceannotations.h(107): error C2059: syntax error : '}'
1>c:\program files (x86)\microsoft visual studio 10.0\vc\include\codeanalysis\sourceannotations.h(119): error C2059: syntax error : 'type'
1>c:\program files (x86)\microsoft visual studio 10.0\vc\include\codeanalysis\sourceannotations.h(139): error C2059: syntax error : '}'

Answer 1

I tracked down the reason of those sudden compiler errors.

In the great tradition of windows.h it appears that Microsoft introduced tokens that cause name clashes with our codebase.

In our precise case, we had:
#define Null (void*)0

Somewhere in our code, we need to use the offsetof macro and to make it available we #include <stddef.h>

I tracked down stddef.h in turns includes crtdefs.h which ends up including sal.h where our Null macro seems to clash with source code annotation in MS headers…

As a workaround, we did:

#if defined(_MSC_VER) && _MSC_VER >= 1600
#pragma push_macro("Null")
#undef Null
#endif
#include <stddef.h>
#if defined(_MSC_VER) && _MSC_VER >= 1600
#pragma pop_macro("Null")
#endif

Our use of Null as a macro is arguable, still I would have expected MS to find a way to avoid clashes with existing code bases.

Hope that helps those facing the same issue.