Windows® via C/C++, Fifth Edition

The Overall Picture

To fully understand how DLLs work and how you and the system use DLLs, let’s start out by examining the whole picture. Figure 19-1 summarizes how the components fit together.

For now, we’ll concentrate on how executable and DLL modules implicitly link to one another. Implicit linking is by far the most common type of linking. Windows also supports explicit linking (which we’ll discuss in Chapter 20).

Figure 19-1. How a DLL is created and implicitly linked by an application

As you can see in Figure 19-1, several files and components come into play when a module (such as an executable file) makes use of functions and variables in ...