Visual Studio 2019 weird behaviour

[iain]

Hi. I just started working on porting control extensions to 3.18.

I'm finding that if I make any changes to the build project under Visual Studio 2019 the changes vanish. I get a message about the solution being modified externally. If I reload, my changes are gone. If I don't reload, then they're gone the next time I bring up the IDE.

I'm unfamiliar with VS2019 and I don't know if this is an internal "feature" or if there's some program spawned to keep the project safe from harm or synced with an external copy somehow. I thought for a time that it was a side-effect of the additional projects in the solution to manage timestamps, but the reset happens even if I delete those projects from the solution.

How can I modify my environment so that I can avoid losing changes?

(This entire question feels surreal to me, but I don't know how else to ask )

[leoknipp]

For me it looks more than a VS2019 problem than a question related to WinCC OA.
You can search the internet for a Microsoft forum where you can discuss this topic.

Best Regards
Leopold Knipp
Senior Support Specialist

[iain]

Thanks. I tried that first and got nowhere, so I figured it had to be something being set up by the newWCCILCtrlExt script. It does seem like it has to be a VS2019 problem. If you haven't encountered it then I guess it must be.

[iain]

It turns out that it is part of the OA script that's doing this. If I rebuild one of the additional projects that I think maintains the build timestamp it rewrites the project for the control extension using cmake. I don't know under what circumstances or what I may have changed to make this become a problem. The workaround I've found is to pull the CE vcxproj out into a clean solution, remove the CMakeLists.txt target (which causes cmake to rebuild all of the other projects) and build it singly.

I don't see that there will be a problem with that, other than losing the timestamp updates.