VisualStudio instructions libpng version 1.6.3 - July 18, 2013 Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Glenn Randers-Pehrson This code is released under the libpng license. For conditions of distribution and use, see the disclaimer and license in png.h This directory contains support for building libpng under MicroSoft VisualStudio 2010. It may also work under later versions of VisualStudio. You should be familiar with VisualStudio before using this directory. Initial preparations ==================== You must enter some information in zlib.props before attempting to build with this 'solution'. Please read and edit zlib.props first. You will probably not be familiar with the contents of zlib.props - do not worry, it is mostly harmless. This is all you need to do to build the 'release' and 'release library' configurations. Debugging ========= The release configurations default to /Ox optimization. Full debugging information is produced (in the .pdb), but if you encounter a problem the optimization may make it difficult to debug. Simply rebuild with a lower optimization level (e.g. /Od.) Linking your application ======================== Normally you should link against the 'release' configuration. This builds a DLL for libpng with the default runtime options used by Visual Studio 2010. In particular the runtime library is the "MultiThreaded DLL" version. If you use Visual Studio defaults to build your application you will have no problems. If you don't use the Visual Studio defaults your application must still be built with the default runtime option (/MD). If, for some reason, it is not then your application will crash inside libpng16.dll as soon as libpng tries to read from a file handle you pass in. If you do not want to use the DLL, for example for a very small application, the 'release library' configuration may be more appropriate. This is built with a non-standard runtime library - the "MultiThreaded" version. When you build your application it must be compiled with this option (/MT), otherwise it will not build (if you are lucky) or crash (if you are not.) Stop reading here ================= You have enough information to build a working application. Debug versions have limited support =================================== This solution includes limited support for debug versions of libpng. You do not need these unless your own solution itself uses debug builds (it is far more effective to debug on the release builds, there is no point building a special debug build unless you have heap corruption problems that you can't track down.) The debug build of libpng is minimally supported. Support for debug builds of zlib is also minimal. You really don't want to do this.