Compiling and Building Your Project

You’ll compile and build at every step of project development to check that your code is correct and that your application behaves as you expect it to. The initial active project configuration builds your application with debugging information, so that you can easily debug any errors you discover. You can specify a different project configuration to be built by default.

The development environment provides several enhancements to the build process, including:

• Building subprojects, such as DLLs
  
  
• Specifying custom build settings for alternate file types, such as Help project (.HPJ) files

In addition, there are many ways to optimize the build process, including:

• Minimal rebuild
  
  
• Incremental compilation
  
  
• Improved incremental linking

Suggested Reading

• Working with Projects, Visual C++ User’s Guide
  
  
• Build Commands in Visual C++, Visual C++ Programmer’s Guide
  
  
• Compiling and Linking Home Page, Visual C++ Programmer’s Guide