Creating a 32‐bit Windows (Win32) DLL Using Visual C++ 6.0 or Visual Studio .NET
Steve Dalton · 2012
This chapter discusses the creation of a 32-bit Windows DLL using Visual C++ 6.0, or Visual Studio.NET. The main advantage of a DLL is that applications that use it only need to have one copy of it somewhere on disk and have much smaller executable files as a result. A developer can also update a DLL, perhaps fixing a bug, or making it more efficient, without the need to update all the dependent applications, provided that the interface does not change. It is found that when an application runs, Win32 assigns it a 32-bit linear address space known as its process. Applications cannot directly access memory outside their own process. A DLL when loaded must have its code and data assigned to some memory somewhere in the global heap.