[fpc-pascal] implicitly linking FPC-generated .dll from Visual Studio

[Seth Grover]

First, let me declare my ignorance of MS development and Visual Studio
in general.

I've got a FPC-generated .dll file I want to implicitly link with in a
Visual Studio (Visual C++) project. If I understand what I'm reading,
I have to have a "import library" .lib file which corresponds to my
.dll. I don't see an obvious way to create this file using FPC
directly.

Can anyone with experience using FPC-generated .dll's in VS help me
out? So far my googling has turned up some MS tools (dumpbin.exe and
imp.exe) which I can use to generate a .lib file from a .dll file
(although in kind of a roundabout way), and I've also come up with
ImpLib (http://implib.sourceforge.net) which has some tools (dll2def
and fasm) which will generate a .def file and then a .lib file. Do I
have to turn to third party tools to do this, or is there an easier
way to generate what I need with FPC? What about the next step
(actually using the .dll in Visual Studio)?

I realize this message is more about VS than FPC, so I apologize if
it's offtopic.

Thanks,

-SG

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Seth Grover
sethdgrover[at]gmail[dot]com