Hi all,

I'm wondering if it's possible to link against symbols in a DLL that have not been exported into a .lib file without having to rebuild the DLL.

The reason for me asking this is that I want to use some helper functions from an open source library that are not part of the public API. Under Linux and MacOSX, I've managed to do this by declaring the functions in a header file, not implementing them and leaving the linker to do its magic. However under Windows (with Visual Studio Express C++ 2008 ) I get a lot of "unresolved external symbol" concerning these functions.

This is my first project on Windows, so I'm not too familiar with how to deal with problem like these. I searched a bit about how to deal with linking problems with DLL's and I've found out that to use a function, it needs to be exported into a .lib file, which in this case it isn't. So that bring me to my original question; would it be possible to link against those functions in some weird hacky way, even though they are not exported?

Something tells me that the answer is no, so my backup solution is to copy the source code for the definition of the helper functions and include it with my application.

Thank You,
Karol Krizka

What you want is explicit linking.

But if you have the source for the library, do you have a good reason not to rebuild the dll? Implicit linking is easier to use.

Best regards,
Lucian

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