LoadLibrary() an EXE?

Question

I have an executable (that I created using Visual C++ 10), and I need to use its capabilities from another program I wrote (same environment). Due to complex deployment requ

Answer 1

The short answer, is "no". After looking far and wide, there is no way to get VC++ to do what I want, and quite likely not any other compiler.

The main issue is that the main() entry point most people know and love is not the real entry point in C++ executables: the compiler needs to do a lot of initialization work to get the "C++ Run Time library" to a usable state, as well as initialize globals, statics and the likes. This initialization uses different code in shared libraries than in executables and there is no way to one to behave like another.

One thing that possibly can be done, is to build the shared functionality into a DLL, and for the primary executable to embed the DLL as a resource, and load it from a memory mapped region of the executable file (there are several code samples how to do this with VC++ on stackoverflow and elsewhere on the web). Now another program can do the same thing by loading the DLL from the bundling executable.