Question

I am getting this linker error in my Visual Studio 2010 project:

ASWHighScores.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _ShellExecute referenced in function _ASWLaunchURL

int ASWLaunchURL(const char* url)
{
   ShellExecute(NULL, "open", url, NULL, NULL, SW_SHOWNORMAL);
   return 0;    // noErr
}

Why would I be getting a linker error? Did a google search, nothing came up.

I have verified that shell32.lib is indeed being linked against in Visual Studio 2010’s Linker -> Additional Dependencies settings. (It’s automatically an “Inherited value” but I also added it to the custom list to be sure.)

Answer 1

Try calling it ShellExecuteA. Usually this substitution is made automatically by a macro defined in the Microsoft header files, but maybe there’s something about your setup which is missing this.