If you receive this error nowadays, and correcting your clock isn’t fixing it, this is related to licensing verification called upon by msbuild and use of the MSVC build toolchain and Windows SDKs for Visual Studio. This issue occurs on or after December 2020 updates to the operating system, during Microsoft’s initial Windows 11 Insider Preview rollout. Unfortunately, if you have updated, which you most likely have automatically, license verification for use of Microsoft’s build tools and SDK is now mandatory. Thankfully, this is free for Community Edition users with a valid Microsoft Account. But if you’re a business with a Professional license to Visual Studio, a license will need to be purchased for your build server, specifically, and included in turnkey.
The changes have now propagated into Windows 10, and a valid Microsoft account is required to use the command-line build tools and Windows software development kit. This will result in the error “Retries failed:” due to templates from the Windows SDK and MSVC development headers that will fail to import if your machine is not correctly licensed to use the toolchain and SDK:
Many businesses using AutoSDK ran into this issue on in-house servers with CO/CI continuous delivery pipelines configured. Our easy solution was turnkey (which will come with UE5), which allows us to provide licensing files for Microsoft Products (as well as others) that will automatically inject the registry and configure the system correctly with the business license and account details. But may not be yours.
- Verify that Visual Studio is correctly logged into the Microsoft account associated with your installation, by starting the IDE and checking on that. Re-login if you are asked to reauthenticate, do so.
- Be sure to use the Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt to kick off the BuildGraph to ensure the correct environment.