In our projects we use number of 3ed party API’s especially from platform SDK and other components and one burden is finding the libraries for those API’s. For Microsoft provided API’s since they have strong documentation, finding the library for particular API is not so tedious. But for other vendors, It may be. We need to dig a lot for finding the lib of that particular API. How can we get rid from this?


You can you #pragma comment( lib, “LibraryName” ) to specify the necessary library file in the header file itself. For e.g. See the following header file.

// EventLog.h
class EventLog
{
    …
};
#ifdef _DEBUG
    // If it’s a debug version…
    #pragma comment( lib, "MyEventLogLibd.lib" )
#else
    // Ooooh!!! Its release version.
    #pragma comment( lib, "MyEventLogLib.lib" )
#endif

If we include the EventLog.h header file, the library required will be automatically included. I dream for the day on which all SDK headers auto includes their libraries… ;)


Target audiance – Intermediate.