MIDL2398 error building with Visual Studio 2010 on Windows 2012

Question

I'm seeing a MIDL2398 error every time I try to compile a Visual C++ (Visual Studio 2010) project which uses COM. This project builds perfectly fine on my Windows 7 developer machine and on a Windows Server 2008 build machine, but not on a Windows Server 2012 build machine.

I found this web site about the various MIDL compiler errors: http://blog.yezhucn.com/midl/compiler_errors.htm

But, I tried it's suggestion for MIDL2398, I verified that "midlc.exe" was in the same directory as "midl.exe" and that both were the same version (both are file version: 7.0.555.1 product version: 6.1.7600.16385, from the Windows SDK v7.1).

I'm guessing it has something to do with Windows Server 2012, but I don't know.

Has anyone been able to get the Windows SDK v7.1 MIDL compiler to work on Windows Server 2012? Or, does anyone know of what else might be causing MIDL2398?

Answer 1

I figured out the problem.

I installed the SysInternals suite ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/sysinternals ) on the build server and then used Process Monitor (procmon) to see what MIDL.exe was trying and failing to do.

In my case, it turned out that there was a file at the root of the C: drive named "Program", so the path to this file was "C:\Program". I don't know what or why, but MIDL.exe was doing something with this file. I renamed the file to "Program--MW", and the MIDL2398 error went away.

If anyone else runs into the MIDL2398 error, I recommend that you also use SysInternals' Process Monitor, add a filter for Process Name -- Contains -- midl, run your compiler and examine the Process Monitor log for errors and strange behavior. It worked for me!

Answer 2

On VS2012, the midl error was caused by com0com installer which created the file Program under the C drive. This is messing with the MIDL as mentioned earlier.

The file C:\Program had the following. Just renaming this file to something else, Ex: C:__Program makes Midl happy.

DIALOG: {
SetupOpenInfFile(C:\WINDOWS\system32\com0com.inf) on line 0
ERROR: 2 - The system cannot find the file specified.


} ...