I haven’t touched Windows development since Windows Vista, and I have only worked with the Win32 API (not MFC or etc.)

I got a project from online that was made for Visual Studio 2015 and up to Windows 8.1, but I see no reason I should not be able to compile it with Visual Studio 2017 (I am running Windows 10 but I don’t think it was re-targeted towards Windows 10 during the project upgrade).

But it gives me this error:

using Microsoft::WRL::ComPtr; // Error	C2653	'Microsoft': is not a class or namespace name

Obviously searching for what I need to #include to get a namespace called “Microsoft” is useless—the returns are just MSDN articles explaining what namespaces are as it is not clever enough to realize I am telling it that the namespace is named Microsoft.

So clearly I am missing some #include but this is a bit baffling as the project should just work.  My research shows this is part of a “Universal” framework.  I’ve spent the last 4 hours adding all the optional components to Visual Studio 2017 that could possibly be related and nothing fixes it.

What the hell is this, what is the missing #include, and what the hell components do I need in Visual Studio 2017?


L. Spiro

That did it.  Don’t know why that was not part of the original code, but thank you.


L. Spiro