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Asked: 2026-05-11T02:59:13+00:00

In Visual C++ , when I build a dll , the output files are

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In Visual C++ , when I build a dll , the output files are .dll and .lib.

Is the name of the dll built into the .lib file .

The reasson I ask this question is : When I built my exe by importing this dll and run the exe , the exe tries to locate the dll to load it in the process address space .

As we just specify the library name (.lib file) in the project properties , how does the exe get to know the name of the dll .

Note : I dumpbin libary file (.lib) and saw that it does not contain the name of the dll .

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  1. The LIB file is turned into an import table in the EXE. This does contain the name of the DLL.

    You can see this if you run dumpbin /all MyDLL.lib. Note that dumpbin MyDll.lib by itself doesn’t show anything useful: you should use /all.

    This shows all of the sections defined in the .LIB file. You can ignore any .debug sections, because they wouldn’t be present in a Release build. In the .LIB file, there are a collection of .idata sections. In the DLL project that I just built, the LIB file contains a .idata$4 section which defines the symbols to be put in the EXE’s import table, including the DLL name:

    Archive member name at 83E: MyDll.dll/       497C3B9F time/date Sun Jan 25 10:14:55 2009          uid          gid        0 mode       2E size correct header end    Version      : 0   Machine      : 14C (x86)   TimeDateStamp: 497C3B9F Sun Jan 25 10:14:55 2009   SizeOfData   : 0000001A   DLL name     : MyDll.dll   Symbol name  : ?fnMyDll@@YAHXZ (int __cdecl fnMyDll(void))   Type         : code   Name type    : name   Hint         : 2   Name         : ?fnMyDll@@YAHXZ
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