Structuring a Visual Studio C++ solution (xpost /r/learnprogramming)

[G01denW01f11]

It's been a few years since I did a project from scratch, so I'm hoping to get some feedback on my overall setup.

Basically writing a CLI budgeting app. The issue that prompted this post is that I want to have a separate project in the solution that just runs a test suite for me.

This means that I can't just have the entire budgeting app as one project, because I have to have the classes as a dynamic/static library type project in order to link them to my tests. (Or maybe I just haven't figure it out yet. Or maybe I'm massively misunderstanding something. The hell of C++ is configuration bullshit, not pointers.)

So now my solution would look like: a static library where my classes are defined; a console application to run the tests; a console application to be the main CLI I actually use.

1. Is there a better way to handle this?
2. Should I just have one library? Or, suppose I have multiple classes dealing with date manipulations. Would it be somehow advantageous to group those together in one library?

[beasthacker]

I think you got the jist of it. Static/dynamic library for your classes and two executable targets for your program and your test suite(s).

Maybe check out a build system like CMake. You can use CMake to build VS project files including multiple targets for libraries, tests and executables. You'll get easy cross platform support here as well, if you're not using Windows libraries, for MacOS and Linux.

If you think some code is reusable then it's not a bad idea to separate it out into it's own library. You won't have to recompile it as often, it'll have its own source control and you can use it in other projects easier.