I'm trying to run my first MSVC-compiled ROS project by following the instructions from here: http://wiki.ros.org/win_ros/hydro/Msvc%20SDK%20Projects

The project involves building the 'hello world' talker from source - pretty straightforward.

I'm using Visual Studio Express 2012. I've been very careful to follow all the suggestions as far as project settings go. Yes, ROSMASTERURI is defined. The project compiles and links just fine, both in Debug and Release configurations. However, when I run the Release version from Visual Studio, I get an "access violation reading location 0x0" error with the following stack trace:

roscpp.dll!ros::NodeHandle::initRemappings(const std::map<std::basic_string<char,std::char_traits<char>,std::allocator<char> >,std::basic_string<char,std::char_traits<char>,std::allocator<char> >,std::less<std::basic_string<char,std::char_traits<char>,std::allocator<char> > >,std::allocator<std::pair<std::basic_string<char,std::char_traits<char>,std::allocator<char> > const ,std::basic_string<char,std::char_traits<char>,std::allocator<char> > > > > & remappings) Line 195 C++

roscpp.dll!ros::NodeHandle::NodeHandle(const std::basic_string<char,std::char_traits<char>,std::allocator<char> > & ns, const std::map<std::basic_string<char,std::char_traits<char>,std::allocator<char> >,std::basic_string<char,std::char_traits<char>,std::allocator<char> >,std::less<std::basic_string<char,std::char_traits<char>,std::allocator<char> > >,std::allocator<std::pair<std::basic_string<char,std::char_traits<char>,std::allocator<char> > const ,std::basic_string<char,std::char_traits<char>,std::allocator<char> > > > > & remappings) Line 85 C++

RosSample.exe!main(int argc, char * * argv) Line 64 C++

msvcr110.dll!_initterm(void (void) * * pfbegin, void (void) * * pfend) Line 889 C

This is my source code, minus all the lengthy comments (Line 64 in the above stack trace refers to the ros::NodeHandle n; statement):

#include "stdafx.h"
#include "ros/ros.h"
#include "std_msgs/String.h"

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
  ros::init(argc, argv, "talker");

  ros::NodeHandle n;

  ros::Publisher chatter_pub = n.advertise<std_msgs::String>("chatter", 1000);

  ros::Rate loop_rate(10);

  int count = 0;
  while (ros::ok())
  {

    std_msgs::String msg;

    std::stringstream ss;
    ss << "hello world " << count;
    msg.data = ss.str();

    ROS_INFO("%s", msg.data.c_str());

    chatter_pub.publish(msg);

    ros::spinOnce();

    loop_rate.sleep();

    ++count;
  }
  return 0;
}

Looking at the NodeHandle source code (http://docs.ros.org/diamondback/api/roscpp/html/node__handle_8cpp_source.html), the only things that I can begin to suspect are references to the remappings map in the NodeHandle constructor and initRemappings function, but that map should have been created using the M_String default constructor.

BTW, I tried running the Debug configuration build of my project and that one fails too, but even earlier, inside ros::init().

Any help greatly appreciated!

EDIT: win_ros explicitly mentions that it is "for native Windows development with the Microsoft Visual C++ Compilers 2010. Currently supporting either Windows SDK 7.1 (cl/nmake) or Visual Studio 10.0." I suspect this may be my problem, since I'm using VS 2012. Someone on here had a similar problem that was fixed by changing to the VS2010 platform toolset. I've yet to try that, but I'm curious if there's a way to make it work without switching toolsets.