OSError: [WinError 126] The specified module could not be found... (Python 3.7 & Visual Studios 2017)

Question

When I try to run my code in Visual Studios 2017, I get the following error.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\dsl0017\Desktop\ANOPP2 extraction\hartIITestPy\HartTwoUsingCfd.python.py", line 13, in <module>
    from ANOPP2_api import *
  File "C:\Users\dsl0017\Desktop\ANOPP2 extraction\hartIITestPy\ANOPP2_api.py", line 11, in <module>
    ANOPP2 = CDLL('libANOPP2.dll', RTLD_GLOBAL)
  File "C:\Users\dsl0017\Anaconda3\envs\py37\lib\ctypes\__init__.py", line 364, in __init__
    self._handle = _dlopen(self._name, mode)
OSError: [WinError 126] The specified module could not be found
Press any key to continue...

The relevant code up leading to the error is:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import numpy as np
import sys
import os
from ctypes import*

from ANOPP2_api import *

Please help... I've been stuck on this for a week. It's a major roadblock in my research.

Answer 1

I had the same issue when I tried to run the ANOPP2 platform on Pycharm. I shifted to Visual Studio and the error magically went away. I don't know as to the why it happened and why it went away.