# Introduction

# POCO C++ Libraries Windows Platform Notes

## Contents

## Introduction

The Windows versions of the POCO C++ Libraries are built with Visual Studio. Basic support for building with MinGW is there as well, but at this time is not officially supported and may or may not work.

Starting with release 1.4.0 the POCO C++ Libraries support new build configurations for Visual Studio. Furthermore, Visual Studio 2010 and 64-bit (x64) builds are now supported in addition to Visual Studio 2008, 2005 and .NET 2003, as previously supported. 64-bit (x64) builds are only supported with Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010.

The following build configurations are available:

- debug_shared, release_shared: dynamic link libraries (DLL) and dynamically linked executables, with DLL C/C++ runtime libraries.
- debug_static_md, release_static_md: static libraries and statically linked executables with DLL C/C++ runtime libraries.
- debug_static_mt, release_static_mt: static libraries and statically linked executables with static runtime libraries.

## Libraries And Linking Considerations

### Automatic Linking of POCO C++ Libraries

The POCO C++ Libraries header files contain `#pragma comment` directives that enable automatic linking of the required POCO libraries to an application. For this to work, a few rules must be kept in mind.

- The default is to link the POCO C++ Libraries dynamically (DLL).
- To link statically, the code using the POCO C++ Libraries must be compiled with the preprocessor symbol `POCO_STATIC` defined.

### Library Naming Conventions

The following naming conventions are used:

- DLL import libraries are named PocoLIB.lib for the release build and PocoLIBd.lib for the debug build.
- Static libraries built using the static multithreaded C/C++ runtime libraries are named PocoLIBmt.lib (release) and PocoLIBmtd.lib (debug).
- Static libraries built using the DLL C/C++ runtime libraries are named PocoLIBmd.lib (release) and PocoLIBmdd.lib (debug).

32-bit libraries are placed in the lib directory. 64-bit libraries are placed in the lib64 directory. DLLs are placed in bin (32-bit) or bin64 (64-bit). 64-bit DLLs are named PocoLIB64.dll for release and PocoLIB64d.dll for debug, respectively.