WinMain entry point in .lib

Hi all,

In my visual studio solution i have 2 projects. One is a Win32 App and the other is a static lib. I want the static lib to have the winmain entry point in and not the win32 app. Everything builds fine and the win32 appp does successfully link with the library. However when i run the program the winmain entry point in the library never executes.

What do I have to do to get this to work?

Thanks

Does the non-lib source have its own entry point? If not, and it is not using the one from the library, the program should not even link.
If it does, remove it.

Hi thanks for the reply :-)

The Win32 app doesnt have an entry point no. However I believe it should have an entry point, because before i linked it with the library the compiler was complaining that there was no entry point defined. But once I linked it with the library it compiled fine.

No, that's the point: the entry point is in the library, so the source doesn't have its own.

Hmm ... what happens if, after compiling, you simply use the "Step" debug command? Where does it start? Trace the CRT init function until the call to WinMain. Where do you get?

I'm curious, why do you need such a thing the first place?

Hi,

when i step debug the program ends. It doesnt go anywhere.

I want to do this because im trying to program a piece of software that im coding a program and it may need to run on linux inthe near future aswell as windows. So the idea is to write the application completely OS independtly and all OS calls like the entry point will be handled through the library. So when its time to switch OS, I need to change the library and not the application.

I have a valid reason why im doing it, but it is difficult to explain why lol. It's basically so when it comes time to switch OS's i dont need to make changes to the main application because it is completely OS independenty and all of the OS dependency is done through the library which I can easily replace with the linux equivelent.

So the WinMain entry point would be replaced with in main to run on linux

I have no problem with such trick.
Created Win Application project
Created Static lib project
Moved WinMain from the first project to the second one
compiled
Run - I enter the WinMain in the library.

Using MSVC 6.0

check your WinMain declaration

My looks like:

Code:

---

int APIENTRY WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance,
                    HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,
                    LPSTR    lpCmdLine,
                    int      nCmdShow)

---

hi there :-)

What was in your win application project?

Thanks

The default hello world project created by VC. It's a good start. I only cut the WinMain

and of course - I disabled the precompiled headers because I hate to mess with them