Building Visual Leak Detector from Source

Building Visual Leak Detector from Source

Because Visual Leak Detector is open source, it can be built from source if you want to tweak it to your liking. The most difficult part about building VLD from source is getting your build environment correctly set up. But if you follow these instructions carefully, the process should be fairly painless.

1. VLD depends on the Debug Help Library. This library is part of Debugging Tools for Windows (DTfW). Download and install DTfW in order to install the required headers and libraries. I recommend installing version 6.5 of DTfW. Newer versions may also work, but older versions will probably not work. Be sure to manually select to install the SDK files during the DTfW installation or the headers and libraries will not be installed (they are not installed with a default installation).
2. Visual C++ will need to be made aware of where it can find the Debug Help Library header and library files. Add the sdk\inc andsdk\lib subdirectories from the DTfW installation directory to the include and library search paths in Visual C++. (See the section above on using Visual Leak Detector on instructions for adding to these search paths).
3. VLD also requires a reasonably up-to-date Platform SDK. It is known to work with the latest SDK (as of this writing) which is the Windows Server 2003 R2 SDK. It should also work with earlier SDKs, such as the Windows XP SP2 SDK or may even work with SDKs as old as the February 2003 SDK. If in doubt, update your Platform SDK to the latest version.
4. Again, Visual C++ will need to know where to find the Platform SDK headers and libraries. Add the Include and Lib subdirectories from the Platform SDK installation directory to the Include and Library search paths, respectively. The Platform SDK directories should be placed just after the DTfW directories.

To summarize, your Visual C++ include search path should look something like this:

• C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows\sdk\inc
• C:\Program Files\Microsoft Platform SDK\Include
• C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VCx\Include
• ...

And your Visual C++ library search path should look like this:

• C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows\sdk\lib
• C:\Program Files\Microsoft Platform SDK\Lib
• C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VCx\Lib
• ...

In the above examples, "VCx" could be "VC", "VC7", or "VC98" (or possibly other values) depending on which version of Visual Studio you have installed. Also, the name of your Platform SDK directory will probably be different from the example depending on which version of the Platform SDK you have installed.

Once you have completed all of the above steps, your build environment should be ready. To build VLD, just open the vld.sln solution file and do a full build.