Category: Software Construction

Starting from Visual Studio 2005, every executable or dynamic library must declare the libraries it uses with a manifest file. This manifest can be embedded in the executable or library, and this is the best way to deal with it.

When using Scons, this embedding does not occur automatically. One has to overload the SharedLibrary builder so that a post-action is made after building the library :

def MSVCSharedLibrary(env, library, sources, **args):
  cat=env.OriginalSharedLibrary(library, sources, **args)
  env.AddPostAction(cat, 'mt.exe -nologo -manifest ${TARGET}.manifest -outputresource:$TARGET;2')
  return cat
 
 env['BUILDERS']['OriginalSharedLibrary'] = env['BUILDERS']['SharedLibrary']
 env['BUILDERS']['SharedLibrary'] = MSVCSharedLibrary

With this method, the embedding is made for every library, which is handy. The same can be done for the Program builder with the line :

  env.AddPostAction(cat, 'mt.exe -nologo -manifest ${TARGET}.manifest -outputresource:$TARGET;1')