What does it mean when Visual Studio reports "The Application Data folder for Visual Studio could not be created"?
Why does Visual Studio give me this message and how can I fix it?
Best Answer
The main reason for this is that the USERPROFILE variable is mirrored from the Electric Make (eMake) machine to the agent machines. If that user name does not have an account on the agent machine, the devenv invocation will result in this error. To avoid this, there are three possible solutions (in order of best to worst):
Add %APPDATA% and %LOCALAPPDATA% to the eMake root:
Windows XP example:
"%USERPROFILE%\Application Data" "%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data"
Windows 7 example:
"%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local
Ensure that USERPROFILE is not excluded from the environment.
- Add --emake-exclude-env=USERPROFILE to the eMake invocation. This will make it so the local USERPROFILE environment variable is not mirrored to the agent, thus leaving it to use the one that is set on the system. To date, this has always worked.
- Set the USERPROFILE variable to the "correct" value for the user that owns/runs the agent before invoking eMake. This should work, but it exposes internals of the agent install to the end user, which is not desirable.
Note: If the eMake machine is 64-bit and the agent machine is 32-bit (or vice versa), you must also apply these changes for "ALLUSERSPROFILE" and "APPDATA".
