The Dreaded MSB3774 and Solution.

Microsoft. A monolithic company that’s fragmented to hell and back. Building for UWP from Unity3D is “documented” but as with most docs, they’re a bit outdated. It said enough of the process, but left a lot to be desired. There were some libraries that needed installing.

MSB3774: Could not find SDK “Microsoft.VCLibs, Version=14.0”.

Ugh, what does that even mean right? It means trouble. First off check if these folders exist:

• C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.16.27023\include
• C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Include\10.0.18362.0\shared” /I”C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Include\10.0.18362.0\um
• C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Include\10.0.18362.0\winrt
• C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Include\10.0.18362.0\ucrt

If they’re not there, great. Install what you need. If they are there…

Not the solution most people want to hear but… 

This is what I did.

All these folders existed for me. I had already reinstalled Visual Studio 2017 and 2015 multiple times over the span of several days. Since the process took 2-4 hours each time I was now wasting productive energy.

In the end I did an OS reset to my Windows 10 machine then installed everything fresh starting with Visual Studio 2015 (for some reason UWP needs this installed and doing nothing). Just the raw essentials though. So there’s 20 gigs of storage sucked away. Thankfully storage is cheap. (Sidestep: My Laptop has 500 gigs and that’s barely enough for Windows 10 and a few games from Steam, ugh).

Then I installed the raw base Visual Studio 2017 with Unity 2018.3. By Raw, I mean I let Unity install VS2017 and I touched nothing.

So now I have a freshly installed, clean Windows 10 system, a failed Logitech BRIO webcam, Unity 2018.3 and 2 versions of Visual Studio installed on my system.

I then wiped out the folder where I built the UWP solution to and rebuilt it in Unity. This gave me a clean everything. All that was left was to open Visual Studio and build the packages for the Windows Store and Xbox (x64 for xbox one). A right click one the project’s sollution revealed a few more things needed to be installed. This is good. I let Visual Studio do what it needed and things were done. The Solution built for the store and I was able to upload to Microsoft!

I learned that UWP is very delicate and requires exact, no more, no less. If you can spare a dedicated system that only builds for Unity, go that route. If not, be careful what you put on your computer. In my case this is my everything computer. Game development, game playing, web browsing.