Visual Studio: project is not up to date “because

Question

I've migrated a solution from VS2008 to VS2010 (SP1).
Now one of my project never finds peace in being up-to-date. Every build have the following output:

1>------ Build started: Project: PROJ_NAME, Configuration: Release Win32 ------
1>Build started 19/05/2011 7:59:27 AM.
1>InitializeBuildStatus:
1>  Creating "Release\PROJ_NAME.unsuccessfulbuild" because "AlwaysCreate" was specified.
1>ClCompile:
1>  All outputs are up-to-date.
1>  All outputs are up-to-date.
1>Lib:
1>  All outputs are up-to-date.
1>  PROJ_NAME.vcxproj -> C:\projFolder.PROJ_NAME.lib
1>FinalizeBuildStatus:
1>  Deleting file "Release\PROJ_NAME.unsuccessfulbuild".
1>  Touching "Release\PROJ_NAME.lastbuildstate".
1>
1>Build succeeded.
1>
1>Time Elapsed 00:00:00.09
========== Build: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 5 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You must check also other files than .h. In my project Readme.txt was missed.

Answer 2

I had a similar problem when one of the include files listed in the project didn't actually exist. I had deleted the file, but forgot to remove it from the project.

The dependency checker then believes the project is not up to date, but the builder finds nothing to build.

Answer 3

To get this to work, I simply renamed my existing output directory, in order to recreate all intermediate files (after trying all of the above accepted answers).

I've had success in the past using DebugView in VS2010 to find files to delete, but today that approach did not work. I could not find ANY reference to the missing header files, found using DebugView, within any of my code or project files XML. I also retrieved the outdated files from TFS to try with them both present and absent on my machine.

I then used GREP to search my entire solution directory, and the only results were in binary files: the old code files' *.obj, the project file's *.pdb, and vc100.idb. I don't know how these files get modified/replaced during build and rebuild, so I'm not sure if a previous reference in one of those files was responsible for claiming the old header files were missing.

Hope this helps someone down the road, and thanks for the above info that got me started!

Answer 4

You may also find this happens after a windows update see this: Up to date projects compiled again because of TZRE.DLL date stamp is in the future after a windows update

The solution is to wait till that time, and the problem will magically vanish. I just had the same problem, My TZRES.DLL file is 17/07/2018 19:54, the time now is 17/07/2018 15:15

Answer 5

I got the same issue.

Root-cause: incorrect build version of VS (32bit and 64bit)

Solution: Switch mode Debug/Release from 32 bit to 64 bit or reverse

http://postimg.org/image/3jurey1qr/

Answer 6

According to this thread on MSDN:

In my case in VS10 it was due to having missing (but non-complied .h files, thus no additional error to identify) in project folders.

A quick check that all project files can open in editor fixed this problem.