[CMake] What do Visual Studio users do so they can run/debug their programs when using 3rd party .dlls?

[Michael Jackson]

Eric,
   For my project I ran into the same problems (http://www.github.com/dream3d/DREAM3D) and I chose to solve the issues by having CMake setup custom build rules to copy the DLLs into the appropriate Debug or Release directory for what I am building. I do this because simply adding the directories to the global PATH is a "bad" idea if you have multiple versions of a particular 3rd party framework, i.e., 32 bit and 64 bit Qt or different versions of Qt. In the same "Copy Code" I also setup install rules for those libraries, again, based on the type of build being performed.

 For packaging CMake has functions available to copy the required MS runtime libraries into the final package scheme for you. I use the following CMake file to setup my packaging. https://github.com/dream3d/DREAM3D/blob/m_develop/Resources/CPack/PackageProject.cmake

For my project all this seems to be working quite well as we don't have any issues with our releases. YMMV.

Cheers
--
Mike Jackson


On May 23, 2014, at 7:23 PM, Eric Wing <ewmailing at gmail.com> wrote:

> My project has lots of 3rd party .dlls. I can build my project just
> fine with CMake/Visual Studio. But when I try to debug/run within
> Visual Studio, it fails because my 3rd party .dlls are not in the same
> directory as where VS generated the .exe.
> 
> I know I can manually copy all my .dlls and put them in the generated
> directory, but I was hoping there was a more automatic way to do this,
> especially since the directory changes when you switch from
> debug/release/etc.
> 
> 
> On a similar note, what do you do for packaging/installing? In
> addition to including the 3rd party dlls, what do you do to include
> Microsoft required dll's like msvcr*.dll and msvcp*.dll?
> 
> Thanks,
> Eric
> -- 
> Beginning iPhone Games Development
> http://playcontrol.net/iphonegamebook/
> -- 
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