I have a CWinApp-based application that is built as a DLL that is loaded by another 3rd party application as a plugin. My app exposes an exported StartPlugin() method that creates a CDialog derived dialog. This exported function is somehow called by the 3rd party application. I’d like to be able to run my DLL outside of the 3rd party application so I can test and play around with UI stuff (not for unit testing).
How can I create a test harness that will allow me to run my dll code? I’m not sure how the main application launches my dll plugin, but I’m speculating that it’s creating a User-Interface thread? So would I just need to create a simple exe that can somehow load my dll and create a new thread or something. Any links to tutorials or articles that explain something like this.
Use the Visual Studio wizard to create a MFC application, probably Dialog based. Have a button on the dialog to run your plugin. In the button code do a LoadLibrary with the name of your DLL, then call GetProcAddress to get a pointer to the StartPlugin function. Then you can call StartPlugin.