Creating a Visual Studio property sheet to ease the use of a C++ library

Question

I am building a C++ library (set of headers, import libs and DLLs). I want to make using this library as easy as possible for any developer who wants to use it. Especially I don't want the consumers of this library to have to worry about changing the header paths, libraries paths and link libraries manually for all the different configurations of their project (Debug|Release and x86/x64/ARM). I know that I can do this using property sheets. I created 6 different property sheets for this purpose (one for each configuration). Each sheet looks like the below (listing just the x86|Debug version, assume that the macros INCLUDEPATH and LIBPATH are correctly defined):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <_PropertySheetDisplayName>MyCPPLib, 1.0</_PropertySheetDisplayName>
  </PropertyGroup>
  <ItemDefinitionGroup>
    <ClCompile>
      <AdditionalIncludeDirectories>$INCLUDEPATH;%(AdditionalIncludeDirectories)</AdditionalIncludeDirectories>
    </ClCompile>
    <Link>
      <AdditionalLibraryDirectories>$(AdditionalLibraryDirectories);$LIBPATH\x86\Debug</AdditionalLibraryDirectories>
      <AdditionalDependencies>MyCPPLib.lib;$(AdditionalDependencies)</AdditionalDependencies>
    </Link>
  </ItemDefinitionGroup>
</Project>

I want to know if it possible to create just a single props file that can take care of all 6 configurations based on whatever is the user's active configuration? How would that file look like?

Answer 1

You can just install your library binaries in a structure such as:

<toplevelsdkdir>
  |-> lib
       |-> x86
            |-> Debug
            |-> Release
       |-> x64
            |-> Debug
            |-> Release

And then just create a single project-wide props file like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <_PropertySheetDisplayName>MyCPPLib, 1.0</_PropertySheetDisplayName>
  </PropertyGroup>
  <ItemDefinitionGroup>
    <ClCompile>
      <AdditionalIncludeDirectories>$INCLUDEPATH;%(AdditionalIncludeDirectories)</AdditionalIncludeDirectories>
    </ClCompile>
    <Link>
      <AdditionalLibraryDirectories>$(AdditionalLibraryDirectories);$LIBPATH\$(PlatformTarget)\$(Configuration)</AdditionalLibraryDirectories>
      <AdditionalDependencies>MyCPPLib.lib;$(AdditionalDependencies)</AdditionalDependencies>
    </Link>
  </ItemDefinitionGroup>
</Project>

If you can want you can replace the variables INCLUDEPATH and LIBPATH with information read from the registry (where you can put it during installation):

<ClCompile>
      <AdditionalIncludeDirectories>$([MSBuild]::GetRegistryValue(`HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\MyCompany\MySDK\v1`, `InstallDir`))\INCLUDE;%(AdditionalIncludeDirectories)</AdditionalIncludeDirectories>
</ClCompile>