Unreal Engine Tips and Tricks

A grab bag of quick tips and tricks covering niche problems and frustrations. Such as fixing C++ project structure after adding new classes in the public/private sub folder.

Unreal Engine 5.5 fixing "Platform Win64 is not a valid platform"

Details
With the recent launch of Unreal Engine 5.5 I ran into an issue when creating C++ projects in combination with a missing SDK and when using Jetbrains Rider and how the project is loaded. If we start by creating a new C++ project named UE55Test and click create. We'll see an error that "Platform Win64 is not a valid platform to build." What causes this is actually a missing Windows SDK from Visual Studio. So open the Visual Studio Installer. Make sure you have the latest Visual Studio 2022 and the community edition works you don't need the professional edition. With the Visual Studio Install open. Click Modify then Individual Components. Search for "Windows SDK" and make sure you have both Windows 10 SDK and Windows 11 SDK installed. I'm going to grab the latest Windows 11 SDK version. Once the SDKs are installed I'm going to delete and recreate the test project from Windows explorer. Again make sure that we have C++ project selected and click create project. Now the project is properly building its source code. The next issue I ran into was with Jetbrains Rider not being able to load the proper nuget library dependencies for our project. My temporary work around is to navigate to the project in windows explorer and then right click the uProject file and open with Jetbrains Rider. It's important to not open the project's Visual Studio solution file with the .sln file ending. This is an issue that I had with UE 5.4 that was resolved with updating the .NET packages. Once the project reopens and loads in Jetbrains Rider we can do a build project to ensure there aren't any other issues. Once we confirm there are no other issues we can then click debug or play to launch the Development Editor again for our project. Once it has successfully relaunched the Unreal Engine editor we are in business to get back to developing with Jetbrains rider and Unreal Engine 5.5 I hope that solves any issues you had with getting Unreal Engine 5.5 working with Jetbrains Rider.