UINara

When attempting to bring a project up to date with the latest Microsoft SDKs, the project did not compile. I had this issue before when re-compiling a project on Windows Vista and yesterday a similar problem occurred on Windows XP. I forgot how I solved the problem on Windows Vista - next time I encounter it I’ll describe the solution - but while its fresh in my mind, here is what I did to solve it on XP.

First a description of the problem: I needed to compile a project which requires the Windows Server 2003 R2 Platform SDK and the DirectShow SDK and the Windows Media Format 11 SDK. Now the DirectShow SDK is part of the platform SDK, but requires among other things a file named ddshow.h which is not available with the latest platform SDK, so you have to download and install the latest DirectX SDK in order to be able to compile the DirectShow that comes with the Platform SDK. Confused yet ?

Now after I installed the latest Platform SDK , the latest DirectX SDK (I only needed the libraries and include files) and the WMFSDK11 (Windows Media Format) SDK, set the new directories in Visual Studio 2005 and compiled, the compiler started choking on several types that it claimed are not recognized in propsys.h (such as PROPERTYKEY and REFPROPVARIANT). Now the thing is that these type are defined in wtypes.h, but there are several wtypes.h files that reside in the different SDK folders and only the wtypes.h in the WMFSDK11 include folder contained the definitions for the types the compiler complained about. So at this point I just put the include directory of the WMFSDK at the top of the list, recompiled and hoped for the best. This, however caused some clashes:

1>c:\program files\microsoft platform sdk for windows server 2003 r2\include\shobjidl.h(1950) : error C2365: ‘SHCOLSTATE_TYPE_STR’ : redefinition; previous definition was ‘enumerator’
1> c:\wmsdk\wmfsdk11\include\shtypes.h(425) : see declaration of ‘SHCOLSTATE_TYPE_STR’
1>c:\program files\microsoft platform sdk for windows server 2003 r2\include\shobjidl.h(1951) : error C2365: ‘SHCOLSTATE_TYPE_INT’ : redefinition; previous definition was ‘enumerator’
1> c:\wmsdk\wmfsdk11\include\shtypes.h(426) : see declaration of ‘SHCOLSTATE_TYPE_INT’
1>c:\program files\microsoft platform sdk for windows server 2003 r2\include\shobjidl.h(1952) : error C2365: ‘SHCOLSTATE_TYPE_DATE’ : redefinition; previous definition was ‘enumerator’
1> c:\wmsdk\wmfsdk11\include\shtypes.h(427) : see declaration of ‘SHCOLSTATE_TYPE_DATE’
etc…

at this point, as it was getting late and my patience was growing short, I took the drastic step and simply opened up the above shobjidl.h in the SDK and commented out lines 1948 to line 1969 in that file which contain the redefinition of the types which were already defined in the WMF11’s shtypes.h

After that point, everything compiled fine. I suppose that are more elegant ways to do this but I don’t have the luxury to spend time on researching how to get the SDKs working together in perfect harmony - and you probably don’t have that time either so hopefully, this will save you the time I wasted.

Below is the order of the include folders that was set in Visual Studio 2005 (right click and select View Image or something similar to view it in a normal size)

Note that the Server 2003 R2 Platform SDK is replaced by the new Windows SDK - maybe if I’d have installed that things would have been smoother. If I ever need it, I’ll post an update…

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Time savers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0feed. You can leave a response, or trackbackfrom your own site.