Header Files – Purpose of Including Header Files in Visual Studio

cheadersvisual studio

So I have including the files to my projects by simply : #include "myheader.hpp" and adding the headers into the solution explorer.

But recently I have realized that I may omit the step of adding the headers to the solution explorer because it does not change anything. The only important fact is to define proper include directories in project properties.

Am I missing something here ? Can someone clever explain this to me ?

Best Answer

Mainly just to give you single click editing.

The solution explorer doesn't effect the dependancy of the build/compiler.

edit. Sometime's it's necessary if you need to 'compile' a header eg. a COM .idl or some Qt moc header file.

Related Solutions

C/C++ – Finding Header Files

I'm currently thinking of using the following algorithm:

Start in the directory of the including file.

Is the header file found in the current directory or any subdirectory thereof? If so, done.

If we are at the root directory, the file doesn't seem to be present on this machine, so skip it. Otherwise move to the parent of the current directory and go to step 2.

Is this the best algorithm to use? In particular, does anyone know of any case where a different algorithm would work better?

I have been working in projects that had a setup like this:

prj  
   |  
   +-config.h  
   |  
   +-sub_A  
   | |  
   | +-config.h  
   | +-...  
   |  
   +-sub_B
   | |  
   | +-config.h  
   | +-...  
   |  
   +-...

Those are then referred to as

#include "config.h"
#include "sub_A/config.h"
#include "sub_B/config.h"
...

Simply searching for a header with a matching file name would blow this, which I believe means that a different algorithm would work better.

Visual Studio – Why Use MSBuild Instead of Solution Files?

First point of fact is that the solution file pretty much magically becomes a MSBuild file when MSBuild executes it -- which is what happens when you build the solution in visual studio. In addition, all those project files are just msbuild files managed by visual studio. In fact, the project files handle most of the real dirty work here no matter if you are building from solutions or building from a custom msbuild script.

We also use TeamCity to build and publish applications and we will typically end up with custom msbuild scripts for most projects. The role these scripts play -- which isn't really easy with a solution file -- is packaging the project for deployment or distribution. Typically these scripts handle some more operational aspects of things -- like building the web project to a particular folder or copying in the running configurations as opposed to the development configurations. The heavy lifting tends to be handled in the project files themselves -- the build script just references those, we don't try and recreate that wheel. Overall it works great and it isn't really much duplicated code. Typically once we get the build scripts up we rarely have to touch them until there are massive changes in a project mandating massively changing the build.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

C/C++ – Finding Header Files

Visual Studio – Why Use MSBuild Instead of Solution Files?

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