Game Development

Visual Studio .NET 2005 + I.C.E. (Internal Compiler Error)

by HidekiAI on Aug.22, 2009, under Game Development

A while back, I wrote a BLog about Visual Studio 2005 and C# not being about to generate DLL Assembly with invalid user (at “http://www.codemonkeyninja.com/blog/?p=320″) – by the way, if you still have this problems after you regedt32 for wrong users, verify and make sure you can succeed if you right-click on Visual Studio and “Run as” Administrator, and if you succeed, this is the problem you are having.

Anyways, at work, I have been using Visual Studio .NET 2005, and off-and-on I would get an “Internal Compiler Error” via cl.exe and I’d make sure that I have the latest service packs installed for Visual Studio.

Just recently, I spent about 2 hrs trying to compile a third party source code (but that’s irrelevant of what I am compiling since this issue has happened in other sources) and I ran into an old MSDN knowledge-base bug where they have suggested disabling “Minimal Rebuild” (under “C/C++” -> “Code Generation” -> “Enable Minimal Rebuild”) to see if I.C.E. would go away.

By the way, this is for Native C++, but I usually turn it off for Mixed and /CLR based as well, just in case…

As mentioned, I do have the latest service packs for Visual Studio, and according to MSDN, this bug has been fixed.

Yet, just by disabling all the projects (for all the $(ConfigurationName) – select “All Configuration”) of Minimal Rebuild, the problem goes away. And yes, I’ve rebooted at least once, tried compiling it from both IDE and via command-line, called cl.exe from MSBuild, devenv.com, and even devenv.exe. Tried clean and rebuild, as well as “del /s /f /q *.pdb *.pch”, etc, etc.

I’ve never trusted minimal rebuilds, incremental linking, and even .PCH sometimes can give me griefs… These mechanisms are supposed to save me time, yet it ends up sometimes taking away the precious dev-time and is hardest to figure out…

P/S: Make sure to at least delete all your “*.pch” after disabling “Minimal Rebuild”.

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Hideki A. Ikeda (HidekiAI) [池田英紀] ["Tony" Ikeda] – BLog