visual studio unable to find assert.h

user_7992308 0
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I'm a first year at uni and I just got my new laptop. I downloaded Visual Studio 2017 and pulled my solution repo. However, I'm having some issues because it appears that a lot of the files I had on my previous computer were not downloaded in the installation of VS. My university wifi is slow and I don't want to re-download if I don't have to. I followed the previous steps I took to download VS 2017 on my old computer. Yet, I'm getting errors like:

  • cannot open source file "assert.h"
  • cannot open source file "errno.h"
  • cannot open source file "float.h"
  • cannot open source file "corecrt.h"
  • cannot open source file "stddef.h"
  • cannot open source file "stdio.h"

(among 20+ others)

If I right-click and choose the "Open document" on the line with the error, I get the message: File '_______.h' not found in current source file's directory or in build system path

However, if I go to my include paths, I can find files like:

  • cassert.h
  • cerrno.h
  • ostream.h

but none of the ones that I'm told are missing.

Mainly, I'm wondering if there is a directory with this files I just need to add to the include directory or whether I just need to admit defeat and reinstall.

Thanks for the help, I welcome editing as I'm sure I've messed things up. I'm new to this.

Cheers,

Caleb

visual-studio-2017 c++
3 Answers

Using VS2017 I was able to resolve this same issue by:

  1. Right click on solution
  2. Selecting 'Retarget Solution'
  3. Selecting an SDK from the Windows SDK Version dropdown
  4. Clicking OK button

enter image description here

user_46559140

Your Visual Studio 2017 installation is probably missing the C packages (they are not automatically included with the Desktop development with C++ workload).

To install it, start the Visual Studio Installer, go to Individual components, and check Windows Universal C Runtime:

enter image description here

I think this component is also automatically marked for installation when adding the Linux development with C++ workload.

user_14858850

I solved the problem by uninstalling my original installation of Visual Studio (2019 version), then reinstalling and including the workload Desktop Development with C++.

In contrast to the above solutions, I did not need (and it did not help) to add the Windows Universal C Runtime.

user_26412420
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