If you've had the type of trouble that we've had here at OSR in the past month getting things to build in the RC1 and later WDK build environments, you've probably noticed that lots of things about the build environment have changed.

One of the more frustrating changes is the fact the BUILD has added the "/nologo" switch to the compilation command for x86. This means that the complete list of parameters passed to build no longer are displayed (nor do they appear in the build log file).  I'm thinkin' this makes it sorta difficult to debug build environment issues, you know?

To the rescue comes DDK MVP Don Burn, who recently posted the following nugget on one of the newsgroups.

Don wrote:

Use the following in the build window before invoking build:

    set BUILD_DEBUG=1

The rsp file will be in the object directory.

Knowing this sure would have saved us a bunch of time in the past month.  Hopefully, it'll save you some time in the future.

One of our friends in Redmond -- a build guru and all around good guy -- helped clarify the cause of this problem for us.  By the way, he noted that while setting BUILD_DEBUG=1 is fine for one-off debugging, you shouldn't leave it on in production environments.

Thanks to Don for passing along this tip, and to friend in Redmond for shedding some light on the cause of the situation.