I was working on a school project tonight, using Visual Studio 2010 on my 64-bit Windows 7 machine, when I began to encounter several different errors each time I built my project:

mt.exe : general error c101008d: Failed to write the updated manifest to the resource of file


C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\Microsoft.CppCommon.targets(574,5): error MSB6006: "mt.exe" exited with code 31.

After searching the internet, I found solutions related to manifest file settings in Visual Studio. My problem was solved when I went to the project properties, under Linker then Manifest File, change Generate Manifest to No.

For those of you that don't care about why things are the way they are, you can stop reading now.

According to Microsoft's documentation, Mt.exe is "a tool that generates signed files and catalogs". Mt.exe is used in the manifest generation process. If you don't know what a manifest is, further documentation explains: "A manifest is an XML document that can be an external XML file or a resource embedded inside an application or an assembly. The manifest of an isolated application is used to manage the names and versions of shared side-by-side assemblies to which the application should bind at run time. The manifest of a side-by-side assembly specifies its dependencies on names, versions, resources, and other assemblies."

I'll leave it up to you to decide whether your Visual Studio project needs this, but for the sake of fixing Mt.exe errors, I don't really care at the moment, in my case.

Support: http://cur.lv/643i6