Visual Studio Platform 2015 Toolset ='v141' cannot be found

Question

I'm trying to compile a project using OpenFrameworks (a library which uses C++) in Visual Studio. The build is set to Release and X64 and in the project properties I have set the Platform Toolset to Visual Studio 2015 (v140)

However every time I try to build the project I get the same error (amongst others)

Error MSB8020 The build tools for v141 (Platform Toolset = 'v141') cannot be found. To build using the v141 build tools, please install v141 build tools.

I know v141 is from the new version of MSVS 2017 but I do not want to upgrade to as the new version is not compatible with OpenFrameworks. I have tried rebuilding the project from scratch several times and have also looked into the VCXPROJ file and verified that everything is set to V140 - and it is. All very bizarre.

It seems that on build, something is setting a requirement for v141 but I cannot seem to find where this is coming from. Does anyone have an idea?

Answer 1

Had this same error trying to npm install after cloning a node based project. It had an npm dependency that required C++ source to be compiled.

I had already modified my VS2017 install to include Individual Components -> VC++ 2017 version 15.7 v14.14 latest v141 tools

but that didn't help.

I applied these commands in succession

1. npm install -g node-gyp

2. npm install --global --production windows-build-tools

The first had no effect but the second did the trick and the npm install command completed successfully after that.

Answer 2

I had such an issue. The solution is: open menu "Project"->Properties->Configuration Properites->General - and choose platform toolset v140.

Answer 3

This was addressed in the comments of one of the answers, but it worked for me. I had both v140 and v141 build tools installed, so when I had to use v140 build tools for something, I set the VCTargetsPath variable to the path of the v140 build tools. Deleting this variable in my environment variables ultimately fixed this issue for me.