Creating a Stand-Alone Application

I have been programming with Qt (a C++ class library used to create GUIs) for over 6 months now, and I am nearing completion of a project for my company. The code is complete, and my final goal in this project is to make the GUI a stand-alone application. I have had a great deal of trouble trying to learn exactly how this is done under Microsoft Visual C++.

Basically, all I want to do is to get this app to run on any Windows machine so the end user doesn't need all the .dlls. How do I go about doing this? Do I need to create a static library for the application and link it to that, or is there a way to have just the .exe run on its own (stand-alone style)?

I don't think knowledge of Qt is necessary. It is only one of the few .dlls I need to link to the application. The following is a list of my system information and programming environment:

-Windows 98
-MS VC++
-*MOCing through moc.exe (using DOS to create the MOC files)

Any information concerning this problem would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

-Bob Leonard

The DLL's *must* be present in order for your app to run. The only other way out would be to write or aquire a utility that converts one to a static lib. Structurally, a dll is identical to an exe (a single bit differentiates the two). Thus, an exe-to-lib utility would work equally well (provided one even exists, of course).

I apologise for the confusion, but I am NOT using .dlls. Actually, I have the static libraries (.lib) for my 3rd party classes. With this in mind, how would I go about creating a stand-alone .exe in MS VC++? Thanks for the help and response!

-Bob

I admit that I don't know much about this, but I think it has to do with the __declspec(dllexport) and __declspec(dllimport) calls that tells it to link dynamically instead of statically. I did this once several years ago, but I don't remember much.

It depends on the version of MSVC you have. Is it professional or enterprise edition? If so, set the project to "Using MFC in a static library" instead of "Using MFC in a shared DLL" (or of course if you aren't using MFC you'd choose "Not using MFC").

hth