null is not an object

If you are trying to use midl.exe but have not before or do not have Visual Studio installed, you may come across a few different errors.

One such error that I had was the following:

“command line error MIDL1001 : cannot open input file oaidl.idl”

So I figured out that I had to get the Windows Platform SDK installed but had a hard time finding it. There is a helpful page on MSDN I found that helps you to choose the right SDK. The link never came up in my search results for some reason and I was only able to find it linked from the Windows SDK blog.

I figured that I would just add that to the PATH environment variable as you may expect to be the case but alas it was not. After a long while of trial and error (mostly error really) I found that you can specify certain paths to be included manually as a command line switch http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa367328(VS.85).aspx

Tags: compiling, random