Question

I have a visual C++ project for a DLL and a setup project for it. In the installer i’ve added the content files of my project.

Is there a way to add a file as a content file depending on if you are compiling debug or release? I want to include boost_date_time-vc100-mt-gd-1_51.dll if I compile under debug and boost_date_time-vc100-mt-1_51.dll if I compile under release.

My additional deps looks like this

Shell32.lib;libzmq.lib;log4cxx.lib;boost_date_time-vc100-mt-gd-1_51.lib;...

Under additional library directories i’ve added the path to all these .lib files which also contains their respective .dll files

I’ve tried the following with no success…

1. Added a Custom build step to run before build that copies the correct dll files to the OutDir and set the Output of this custom build step to be the dll files.

2. Conditionally include a content file by manually editing the vcxproj file. If configuration was release mode I would set the non-debug version as deployment content and the debug version to false and vice versa for Debug mode. This looked something like this,

   <ItemGroup Condition="'$(Configuration)'=='Release'">

   <None Include="boost_date_time-vc100-mt-1_51.dll ">

   <DeploymentContent>true</DeploymentContent>....

   </None></ItemGroup

Neither of these worked however. The second option seemed to always default to debug mode no matter how I built my project.

Answer 1

When you add a dependency, you can add it to one configuration or all configurations:

[This picture is of VS 2012, but 2010 and 2008 look pretty much the same.]

So, you pick the configuration you want to modify at the top-left, then add the library to the additional dependencies. Note that what you add here will be the .lib file associated with a DLL, not the dll itself (the compiler will make the executable depend on the DLL because you link with its .lib file).