OMFG, my VS 2015 completely melted down.

[chriscalef]

Hey, I've got a problem that according to Google does not seem to be all that common, so it's kind of a long shot looking for help here... but does anyone have any experience with Visual Studio failing and being unable to reinstall? Everything was going fine on Saturday, then on Sunday morning I fire up VS and open a project and it doesn't show anything in the solution explorer, but there's an error across the bottom (sorry, didn't record it, didn't realize how bad this was going to get).

Then I try to close the program and get more errors, such that I have to go to Task Manager to kill it. Come back in and try opening a different project, same behavior. Then it gets interesting - I try to uninstall, and get messages about a bunch of things it couldn't uninstall on its own (like the redistributables, Azure, etc.). Try to reinstall anyway and come back to same problems.

Then I go through add/remove programs and manually uninstall a huge pile of c++ redistributables, reinstall, no change. Then I google a bit and find out about the cache folders in AppData/Local and/or Roaming, and delete them too. Uninstall/reinstall VS. No change.

I'm starting to wonder if I'm going to have to do a full pave and reinstall windows here, WTF?? I only had one bug to fix. :-(

Would accept all forms of advice, hand-holding, or simply commiseration.

[Jason Campbell]

I hate to say it but it would probably be less of a hassle to reinstall Windows. I guess the newer versions have a more advanced uninstaller but apparently it is a pain in the balls to know what component isn't being shared. I feel your pain but I'm a deserter. I switched to Linux and am through with Windows forever. Sorry I don't have better advice and I don't know how hard it is to back up your system.

[chriscalef]

Yeah, this definitely has been a bump toward full linux, on the first day without VS I went straight over and got my first stock T3D compile working. Gotta port all my project work over to there and then I can see living there. How hard/possible is it to cross compile for Windows, anyway? Or Mac?

Oh, re: my problem here, if anyone else has something similar this thing _might_ help you, although it unfortunately didn't help me:

https://github.com/Microsoft/VisualStudioUninstaller/releases

It sure looked like it was doing the job, but no change in results.

[Jason Campbell]

Compiling for Windows is the thing. I don't want to even run Windows in VM. Up until last week I've been compiling T3D from command line only. I have been experimenting with and having a good time with Code::Blocks. It is very easy to visually add custom code to the project. I'm going to try VS 2010 express in WINE but I'm dubious of the results. Right now I am obsessed with getting Bryce's Tactical AI Kit ported to 3.10. I've almost given up once or twice. By the way T3D 3.5 seems to run great in WINE so if I can't get it working for a Linux T3D...

[JeffR]

Without specifics of the error messages that VS and Windows are spitting out, any help we can provide is a bit limited, but I *did* have one case where some corrupted windows bits did mean windows forgot it's own environment variables, so lots of stuff like VS and whatnot didn't work. I think I had corrupted sectors on the HD at the time that was causing some bad juju.

If you can, post stuff up.

If not, compiling with linux/mac is a pretty straightforward deal at this point cmake > open project in favorite compiler > compile dat ho.

[chriscalef]

Thanks Jeff! Yeah, I did compile dat ho on linux, just to make myself feel better, but is there a straightforward "cross compile dat ho for windows" path?

Re: my problem, I've been getting some help on the MSDN forums, although so far no luck. You can follow the progress here though:

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/ca50981d-37fb-42d2-ad58-d903d05b8302/vs-2015-melted-down-and-cannot-effectively-uninstallreinstall

[JeffR]

Also, I don't think it'd help the perdicament DIRECTLY, but maybe try nabbing the 2017 RC?

Going off that thread, they already suggested the Uninstaller tool, because up until 2017, VS never actually uninstalled it's crap properly without an entire separate external tool. 2017RC supposedly does a MUCH cleaner install/uninstall process(at minimum, when i tested it out, the installer interface sucked a lot less).

So I figure, at minimum, you can try nabbing that and seeing if that works. If the 2017RC installs OK, that at least informs you that the win install itself shouldn't be borked completely.

[elfprince13]

I just use a Windows VM, but there are tutorials out there for cross compilation and I'm sure CMake makes it easier now. I'm curious if anyone has verified if the Windows build of Torque is MinGW / Cygwin compatible, because if you are going to cross compile you might as well get the benefit of a modern compiler like GCC or Clang.

You might also look into compiling and linking with MSVC running under Wine which is something that's been done before.

[chriscalef]

Hey, nice idea @JeffR, don't know why it didn't immediately occur to me to upgrade as soon I noticed there was a 2017 version out... but that actually worked! Had a scare there for a minute when it looked like it was doing the same thing... but on restart it retargeted my project and then went ahead and built it.

WHEW. That was an ugly one. :-p

[JeffR]

Glad to hear it!

Sounds like it wasn't windows, thankfully and just something reaaaally stupid with 2015. Maybe some corrupted preference/config stuff that wasn't getting cleared out.