Wednesday, May 25, 2016

The cause of MIDL error MIDL2398

Whilst working on a Windows Visual Studio (VS) project that uses MIDL (Microsoft IDL) I suddenly started getting the error MIDL2398 during the build. This was for no apparent reason. I tried the usual things, logging off, rebooting, cleaning the VS project, blowing my SVN checkout away and doing a fresh build. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn't. This was driving me nuts. Googling didn't yield much. Other people were also seeing this problem but no-one explained it and several people said that when they re-installed VS it went away. Yeah, right.

After a few hours of these failures I noticed something. The problem seemed to happen roughly on the hour. Then I remembered. I had recently set up a jenkins job to run on the hour. The jenkins job was building something else in an unrelated area but the coincidence seemd too great to ignore. I disabled the job. It turns out that the jenkins job was failing and during the failure logging it tried to log to a logfile without using double quotes around the filename. Since it was a jenkins job with the default jenkins install directory, the pathname started with "C:\Program Files (x86)\Jenkins". This was causing the logfile "C:\Program" to be created. The jenkins job, being run by jenkins, had administrator privileges so it was allowed to write this file to the root directory. When my VS got to the COM bit where it runs MIDL I got the error.

The fact is that the presence of the rogue file "C:\Program" kills MIDL with this weird error. Well I never. And it turns out to be easier to accidently create this rogue file than you might think.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Thank you! Still happens in VS2019.

LR said...

same problem to me! your post saved my life ;)

Unknown said...

Thanks for posting this solution. Sure enough I found the file C:\Program and removing it solved the problem.