1.13. Building a Complex Application with an IDE
Problem
You wish to use your IDE to build an executable that depends on several static and dynamic libraries.
Solution
The basic outline is as follows:
If you are building the dependent libraries from the source, and they don’t come with their own IDE projects or makefiles, create projects for them, as described in Recipe 1.11 and Recipe 1.12.
Create a new project and specify that you wish to build an executable rather than a library.
Choose a build configuration (e.g., debug versus release, single-threaded versus multithreaded).
Specify the name of your executable and the directory in which it should be created.
Add your source files to the project.
Tell the compiler where to find the headers for the dependent libraries.
Tell the linker what libraries to use and where to find them.
If your IDE supports project groups, add all the projects mentioned above to a single project group and specify the dependency relationships between them.
If your IDE supports project groups, build the project group from step 8. Otherwise, build the projects individually, taking care to build each project before the projects that depend on it.
As with Recipe 1.11 and Recipe 1.12, the steps in this outline vary somewhat depending on the IDE. The third step is covered in detail in Recipes Recipe 1.21, Recipe 1.22, and Recipe 1.23. For now, you should use the default settings wherever possible.
For example, here’s how to build an executable from the source code in ...