Build Succeeded, but no .lib file gets created

I inherited a substantial amount of code, including a visual studio project that is supposed to (as best as I can tell) build a .lib file. Visual studio says "... Generating Code... Creating Library... Creating browse information file...", and at the end, it says the build succeeded. In the release/debug folder, it has a bunch of .obj files, but it doesn't have a .lib file. What could I be missing?

Thanks!

Solution 1:

Open the Project Properties (right-click the project in Solution Explorer, select 'Properties'). Under 'Librarian', check 'Output File' - that's where the output should go.

If this looks right, try dir /s *.lib in a suitable subdirectory for your project, to see if you can locate the output library by date and time. If you still can't find it, try a clean rebuild (right click project, select 'Rebuild').

For DLLs, a .Lib file is not created if the DLL exports nothing for external usage. I don't think this applies for static lib builds but I would make sure you are exporting something public from your library project source code.

Solution 2:

.lib will not get generated if you miss to add prefix __declspec(dllexport) for methods.

Solution 3:

My static library contains nothing but two template classes, so I didn't have a .cpp file. This caused Visual Studio 2015 to not output a .lib file. To solve this, I made a file huh.cpp which includes all of the headers.