Visual Studio 2010

I am not a fan of Visual Studio. Unfortunately I must use it for some projects. Recently I was forced to upgrade to Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010. Not wanting to duplicate all my files, I decided to leave them on a network drive and just access them via the network.

Seems like a good idea, after all, why have a network if you store everything locally? Well, it seems that Visual Studio does not like that.

For some settings it will decide to find a suitable local directory for you. For some other settings it leaves you high and dry.

For example, when I try and build my program I get the error:

Error    1    error C1033: cannot open program database '\\server\share\working\project\debug\vc100.pdb'    \\server\share\working\project\stdafx.cpp    1    1    project

The internet was of little use which is why I thought I would put it in my blog.

This goes a long way to explain my criticism of Visual Studio. After installing several gig of software, is that the best error message it can come up with? Well I will try the help, Oh, that is online only. After jumping through some hoops, the help tells me that:

This error can be caused by disk error.

Well, no disks errors here. Perhaps it means that it does not like saving the .pdb on a network share. What is a .pdb anyway???

In the end, my solution (can I call it that or as Visual Studio hijacked that word?) was to save intermediate files locally:

• Open Project -> Properties...
• Select Configuration Properties\General
• Select Intermediate Directory
• Select <Edit...>
• Expand Macros>>
• Edit the value (by double clicking on the macros or just typing in):

$(TEMP)\$(ProjectName)\Debug\

• Select OK
• Select OK

And that seems to sort it out.