Question

I ran into a strange problem with a Visual Studio 2008 project I was working with recently.

I am trying to compile a new static library that uses functions from another static library. (Let’s say Lib1 is my static library project, and Lib2 is the lib file that Lib1 depends on).

I am able to build lib1 without issue; It includes the header files for lib2 and calls its functions, and there are no problems.

The problem is when I build a separate test project that has Lib1 as a dependency; it won’t build and I get linker errors. The unresolved externals are the functions I am trying to call within Lib1 that are from Lib2.

This is all fixed when I include Lib2 in my test project as well.

This all makes sense to me of course; I can test that Lib2 is not being built into Lib1..

My question is: is there a way to do this? I would ideally like to be able to deploy Lib1 as a standalone lib without requiring Lib2. (Lib2 is actually just a Lib from the Windows Platform SDK, so it’s not really a big deal…)

Is this not allowed because it would allow people to “hide” third party libraries in their own, or something?

What would be a professional approach to this problem?

Thanks!

–R

Answer 1

I would not advise using a librarian to take Windows’ library contents into your own library — it’s likely that that’s against the license.

I see two possibilities

1. Documenting the dependency
2. Using a #pragma in your .h file that requests the .lib to be linked against. If VS can find it, it’s the same as including it on your link line.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7f0aews7(VS.80).aspx

 #pragma comment(lib, "libname.lib")