2 VisualStudio instructions
4 libpng version 1.7.0beta31 - February 6, 2014
6 Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Glenn Randers-Pehrson
8 This code is released under the libpng license.
9 For conditions of distribution and use, see the disclaimer
12 This directory contains support for building libpng under MicroSoft
13 VisualStudio 2010. It may also work under later versions of VisualStudio.
14 You should be familiar with VisualStudio before using this directory.
18 You must enter some information in zlib.props before attempting to build
19 with this 'solution'. Please read and edit zlib.props first. You will
20 probably not be familiar with the contents of zlib.props - do not worry,
21 it is mostly harmless.
23 This is all you need to do to build the 'release' and 'release library'
28 The release configurations default to /Ox optimization. Full debugging
29 information is produced (in the .pdb), but if you encounter a problem the
30 optimization may make it difficult to debug. Simply rebuild with a lower
31 optimization level (e.g. /Od.)
33 Linking your application
34 ========================
35 Normally you should link against the 'release' configuration. This builds a
36 DLL for libpng with the default runtime options used by Visual Studio 2010.
37 In particular the runtime library is the "MultiThreaded DLL" version.
38 If you use Visual Studio defaults to build your application you will have no
41 If you don't use the Visual Studio defaults your application must still be built
42 with the default runtime option (/MD). If, for some reason, it is not then your
43 application will crash inside libpng17.dll as soon as libpng tries to read
44 from a file handle you pass in.
46 If you do not want to use the DLL, for example for a very small application,
47 the 'release library' configuration may be more appropriate. This is built
48 with a non-standard runtime library - the "MultiThreaded" version. When you
49 build your application it must be compiled with this option (/MT), otherwise
50 it will not build (if you are lucky) or crash (if you are not.)
54 You have enough information to build a working application.
56 Debug versions have limited support
57 ===================================
58 This solution includes limited support for debug versions of libpng. You
59 do not need these unless your own solution itself uses debug builds (it is
60 far more effective to debug on the release builds, there is no point building
61 a special debug build unless you have heap corruption problems that you can't
64 The debug build of libpng is minimally supported. Support for debug builds of
65 zlib is also minimal. You really don't want to do this.