'Why are my Preprocessor Directives locked

I've done lots of research but haven't found any answers yet.

I'm working on a plugin to run inside a proprietary program called Autodesk Revit. This plugin needs to be distributed to 3x different companies, each using the their own filing system.

I'm storing some file paths in read-only fields in a separate static class in another project in VS but within the same solution and used preprocessing directives to define symbols named after each company I'm distributing the plugin to. I then set each field to different file paths under preprocessing #if, #elif, etc, so I can just define/undefine the symbols before compiling the code so I can distribute them to each appropriate company (sample code below).

I have no conditional compilation symbols setup in the property of either project and I realise I can use config files for that as well but since this plugin is running inside a host program there are some workarounds needed to get that to work which I'd rather avoid.

Regardless of what symbol I define or undefine, my plugin is pointing at COMPANYB at all times. What am I missing?

#define COMPANYA
#undef COMPANYB
#undef COMPANYC

namespace MyNamespace
{
    public static class FileLocations
    {
#if COMPANYA
            public static string fieldA => @"\\serverNameA\filenameA.rte";
            public static string fieldB => @"\\serverNameA\filenameB.rte";
            public static string UsageFolder => @"\\serverNameA\ScriptUsage\";


#elif COMPANYB
            public static string fieldA => @"\\serverNameB\filenameA.rte";
            public static string fieldB => @"\\serverNameB\filenameB.rte";
            public static string UsageFolder => @"C:\Temp\";


#elif COMPANYC
            public static string fieldA => @"\\serverNameC\filenameA.rte";
            public static string fieldB => @"\\serverNameC\filenameB.rte";
            public static string UsageFolder => @"C:\Temp\";
#endif
    }
}
c++sharppreprocessor-directive


Solution 1:[1]

I found the issue. My VS solution has two projects which are two plugins (plugin A and plugin B) which run inside the main program (Autodesk Revit). Both plugins share what I call "helper classes" which I created as a third project in the solution.

I updated one of the helper classes and rebuilt plugin A but plugin B had an old version of the helper class dll in the folder which seemed to be taking precedence over the new one. Once I replaced that dll as well plugin A worked as expected.

I'm fairly new to programming (approx 2 years) and self taught, every bit of advice is very welcome to help me avoid these issues in the future.

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 floretti

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