Project Properties in Someone else's project - How not to hang over trifles?

Question

C++ / C#

I'm new to C++, working in Visual Studio 2015.
Lately I've been spending a lot of time "finishing" other people's projects - especially compilation problems, the solution of which was covered in Project Properties. Because of this, I thought about how to properly approach the analysis of someone else's project? Preview all settings? What to pay attention to?
For example: I got Error about incompatible types of variables. Like our code, therefore I dig. As a result, after many jumps, it turns out that in WS2tcpip.h there is some kind of define that depends on Unicode, and Unicode is set as default in the parameters of this project.
Probably, this comes with experience, but maybe there are some tricks on how to correctly understand someone else's project? And not only code, but also environment settings, etc.
Thank you!

Answer 1

There is no magic pill, everything comes with experience. But no matter how much programming experience you have, shit code will always be hard to read.