Visual Studio 2012 no C-Header installed?

Question

I have installed VisualStudio 2012 and was working for about 2 weeks with it. But now I wanted to start a C++ project (i am c# programmer usually) and I wrote some simple code. After that I wanted to compile it and I got lots of errors... there are no standart c-header files.

What I ve done: Created a new Win32 Project (empty project) Created code with these includes:

#include <windows.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <tchar.h>

Windows.h is found the rest not. Does anyone has an idea? I also had look at the IncludeDirectories:

$(VCInstallDir)include
$(VCInstallDir)atlmfc\include
$(WindowsSDK_IncludePath)

Thats all. Does anyone has an idea?

Answer 1

Probably you found this known issue: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/774158/re-installed-visual-studio-2010-and-c-standard-headers-are-missing If you install Visual Studio 2012 importing settings from Visual Studio 2010, and then uninstall it and reinstall it, the C++ standard headers are gone.

There is a solution that worked for me, proposed by Jeff at: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/a987f4fa-676f-4fda-ab69-2c6bcc2684c3/visual-studio-c-2012-standard-header-files-are-missing?forum=vssetup

which entails modifying a copy of vc_librarycore.msi with orca, and then running it. That will install part of the VC folder, where the include files are (Note that modifying the original vc_librarycore.msi directly as the answer suggests did not work, probably because of permissions, so I copied the whole vc_librarycore folder to a different directory). Also note that the UUIDs used in the answer may change according to the updates applied to Visual Studio 2012.