Thread: Newbie question Building Library Binaries

Good Day All,

I am quite new to c++. I am hoping someone could point me in the direction of some documentation or offer some advice regarding how to 'build library binaries' from source code. I am programming on MSVC6 on windowsXP.

Thanks!

not much to it -- just create a library project. File --> New, then in the project list select one of the library (*.lib) project types. Don't confuse *.lib with DLL, they are not the same.

Thanks for the reply!
I have done this. The only noticable output is a file called PDFlib.NCB .... Could this be what Im looking for? I figured Id get somesort of *.lib file .... Could you breifly explain the difference between the *.DLL and the *.lib?

Many Thanks

The .lib and .dll files are put in either Debug or Release subdirectory (depending on which kind of build you did). That diectory also contains *.obj files and some other stuff.

A .lib file is what your program must link with in order for the linker to resolve the functions that were called. The library can be statically linked, which means that every program has its own copy of all the functions. A DLL is a Dynamic Link Library -- only one copy of the code resides on the computer and all programs access that one copy. There are a few programming differences too, but don't worry about them until you want to write a DLL.