Question

I’m in the middle of writing a C++ extension to a computer game using a third-party library. Since each person who develops against this system may have the header files in different directories, it uses environment variables in its project file to point to where those header files are located.

Occasionally, new versions of the libraries are released, and I tend to keep the new and old versions around in case I need to compile against the old version.

Changing the environment variable to point to the new version’s location worked perfectly in Visual Studio 2008.

Changing the environment variable to point to the new version’s location is a massive failure in Visual Studio 2010.

I’ve tried all of the following:

1. Using setx to change the environment variable in a cmd shell.
2. Rebooting the computer
3. Rescanning the Solution
4. Unloading and reloading the project.
5. Recreating the project and solution files.

None of these has worked.

Is there some way to prevent VS2K10 from caching environment variables?

Answer 1

It turns out this may have been something with the way that Visual Studio or Windows was configured on that computer. My laptop’s Visual Studio 2010 install does not exhibit this same problem.

This machine had a critical existence failure late last week, and I’ll see if its replacement has the same problem after I install VS2010 on it.