Is there a way to relink a solution without rebuilding any project?

Question

I have a big C++ solution in Visual Studio 2008 with many projects, that links to other libraries. sometimes I want to link the solution to different libraries, and for doing so and create a new exe file I need to re-linking the solution.

But, the re-linking can be done only if at least one of projects need a rebuild. so I manually change one line in the code and change it back...

Is there a better way to only redo the linking process?

Answer 1

Isn't there an option in the context menü of the project? Only Project -> link only ? Sorry I just translated it from my german dev studio 2008.

Answer 2

You could delete the exe. Thus it needs to be rebuilt which is a simple link.

Although if you use different libraries do you need different headers for them if so you need to delete objects - in this case probably best to dop a rebuild of the main project.

Probably the most complete alternative but most difficult to implement is to touch (ie change the modification timestamp) the library and headers you want to use and then Visual Studio build will do the minimum build.