Visual c++ 2008 express creating a library

Question

I know many have asked this question, but following the things suggested hasn't seemed to work for me. So I thought I'd ask for help, as I'm obviously missing something.

I've spent the past couple days writing some code that uses the boost library that allows me to open text files, translate the text into a usable data format, and save the data as a text file when I'm done with it. I built it specifically to be extendable to deal with different datatypes (specifically any object or class I make down the line) so that I could link to it as a library in my project as I do other libraries.

However, even after compiling it into a lib and adding the directory of the lib to the "Additional Include Directories", I get an unresolved external error whenever I try to include one of the header files in the library. I've also tried putting the direct path to it under Additional Dependencies (as well as just the library name with the path to the directory set in Additional Include Directories and Additional Library Directories. I also tried it with only one of those on at a time and it still failed).

Is there something I'm missing? How can I compile this code I'd like to reuse and link to it in new projects without copying the cpp and h files into my solution every time? Would a DLL work better/easier? If so, how would I go about compiling it as a dll and linking to it?

Thanks for reading this wall of text. Any help you could provide would be great.

Answer 1

Ok. While it's not the exact solution I was going for, I managed to figure this out. For anyone running into this problem, there's a wonderful tutorial that explains how to make DLL files and make use of them (at least on windows, don't have any computers using an alternate OS set up yet to test the DLL on). You can find it here.

http://programmingexamples.wikidot.com/blog:1

The gist of the problem is you need to also keep a copy of the .h file handy to include in your project. (what I did is created a directory on my C drive that holds the libraries I'm making, and in that I have a folder for the .lib files and a folder for the .h files.) Either import the .h file directly into your project directory or add it to your project properties (C++ -> General -> Additional Include Directories ). Make sure for that, you're linking to the directory, not the file itself. In the linker, you need to add your .lib file to the Additional Dependencies section (Linker -> Input -> Additional Dependencies). You can put the whole path here, or you can just put the file name, then tell the program where to find the directory it's in (add the path to the directory to Linker -> General -> Additional Library Directories)

Hope this helps anyone else who managed to miss something that everyone else seems to understand instinctually :P