'Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'eclccPath')' in VSCode w/ ECL Extension

[HWatanuki]

Reporting an issue that I was not able to address/reproduce for tracking purposes.

During a hackathon event in April 18th 2023, a specific student with a Mac OS PC was having the following pop up error message while submitting a simple "OUTPUT('hello');" via VSCode to one of ours HPCC Systems clusters: 'Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'eclccPath')'.

• User was using the latest versions of the Vscode and the ECL extension at that time and had two versions of clienttools installed on his PC: 9.0.0 and 8.12.0 (both were reporting the same error message)
• Reinstalling the ECL Extension and the clienttools did not address the error message.
• Syntax check was working fine.
• Trying to manually specify an eclcc path in the settings of the ECL extension to override the automatic detection made the error message to change to "Empty Archive" when submitting the workunit.
• Other students using either Windows PC's or Mac OS PC's at the same event and using the same setup as this student were able to submit their code successfully.
• We have seen other occurrences of the same error message on Windows PC's when the Microsoft C++ redistributable package is missing from the PC