DLL location

Normally a program looks for the dlls it needs inside of whatever folder it is in. How do I make it so that it will look for my program's dependencies (such as sdl.dll, sdl_ttf.dll, etc.) inside of a folder called DLL?

look in
C:\Program Files\My Program\DLL
instead of
C:\Program Files\My Program

IDE - MSVC 6

#using "dlls\Whateveryourdllnameis.dll" ?
just put the folder name and then a '\' before the name of your dll.
I've never used one but that should work.

I don't think it's possible. You play computer games? Look in the folder of any computer game you have installed. The DLLs are in the same folder as the executable. You'd think if there was a way, they'd probably do it.

The OS(?) uses the PATH environment variable to find the DLLs so put .\DLL in PATH or similar. Not sure how to do it hardcoded.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Doodle77

#using "dlls\Whateveryourdllnameis.dll" ?
just put the folder name and then a '\' before the name of your dll.
I've never used one but that should work.

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That's not how DLLs work.

Though thinking about it, I'm thinking if you load DLLs on the fly with LoadLibrary() you could specify a path. Not too sure on that. I'm thinking about things like web browsers with plugins. My guess is it would be significantly slower to do that, though.

Here is a nice little article to read up on: http://www.flipcode.com/articles/art...tingdlls.shtml

Code:

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LoadLibrary("stuff\\junk.dll");

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Thanks Sly. It seems I might be able to get away with having only SDL.h in the main folder while everything else is in a sub folder using LoadLibrary

Though, if I were you, I'd still check out and see if it's slower to use LoadLibrary() than it is to compile with an import library. I have a funny feeling about it. If your DLL is really big, you might want to consider just doing it normally.

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using loadlibrary should make the loading of the DLL a bit slower (and maybe calling it too because it would need to do more resolving at runtime) but it's more flexible and uses less memory while the DLLs are not loaded.
The static loading would load the DLL in memory at application startup, when one of the reasons to use DLLs in the first place can be to put rarely used bits of code outside normal program memory and loading (and unloading) them as required.