I’ve recently installed VS2008 on a new machine, and now find that it will not link with DLLs built on an older machine, giving error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol __forceCRTManifestCUR. I presume that this pertains to an issue with Side-By-Side.
Having researched a little, I now suspect that the issue is that the old VS2008 installation is upgraded to version 9.0.30729.4462 QFE, whereas the new VS2008 installation is on 9.0.21022.8 RTM.
On researching further, I read that I needed to install SQL Server 2008 to at least SP1 in order to upgrade VS2008 to the later version. I installed SQL Server 2008 on the new machine however, and it is now at SR3, yet VS2008 is still on version 9.0.21022.8. I suspect that the SQL Server that I installed was pre-service-packed up to SR2, and that this might be the problem.
Windows (Microsoft) Update shows no pending updates for either SQL Server 2008 or Visual Studio 2008.
Please can you suggest a way of forcing Visual Studio to upgrade to the 9.0.30729.4462 QFE version?
Alternatively, are there any other solutions to this problem that don’t involve recompiling all of my precompiled DLLs?
Whoops – it looks like I had been totally misled by Microsoft.
It turns out that it is Visual Studio Service Pack 1 that updates the version from 9.0.21022 to 9.0.30729.
I was convinced that I already had SP1 installed because:
a) The About dialog mentioned SP1 explicitly (though this turned out to be .Net 3.5 SP1 not Visual Studio 2008 SP1)
b) Windows Update did not offer SP1 for download, and all of the “Check for update” links route to a page that instructs you to use Windows Update.
Subsequent to my original question, I had managed to get my source-base to build by installing the C++ Feature Pack for VS2008, but nothing would run due to Side-by-Side errors. Eventually it occurred to me that maybe the SP1 had not been installed.