Using Visual Studio project properties effectively for multiple projects and configurations

Question

I have always used Visual Studios built in GUI support for configuring my projects, often using property sheets so that several projects will use a common set.

One o

Answer 1

As far as the output library goes, you can select all your projects, then bring up the property pages, select All Configurations, All Platforms and then set the Target Name to:

$(ProjectName)-$(PlatformToolset)-$(PlatformShortName)-$(Configuration)

which would give an output like mylib-v100-x86-Debug.lib

We do something similar to this for Additional Library Directories as well, using $(PlatformName) and #(Configuration) to pick out the right library paths, although it does mean some messing around with initial setup of the libraries. eg we have boost install its libs to boost/lib.Win32 or boost/lib.x64.

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With regards to libraries, and people installing them in different places, there are a couple of options. If you have a very robust source control system, you can just put everything in source control, living in a libs folder next to your source. That probably won't work if you use more than a few libraries though, or if they are particularly large.

The other option that comes to mind is to set an environment variable on each user machine that points to the root of their libraries folder, eg LIB_ROOT=c:\libraries, and you can then access that in Visual Studio as $(LIB_ROOT).