Windows® via C/C++, Fifth Edition

Delay-Loading a DLL

Microsoft Visual C++ offers a fantastic feature to make working with DLLs easier: delay-load DLLs. A delay-load DLL is a DLL that is implicitly linked but not actually loaded until your code attempts to reference a symbol contained within the DLL. Delay-load DLLs are helpful in these situations:

• If your application uses several DLLs, its initialization time might be slow because the loader maps all the required DLLs into the process’ address space. One way to alleviate this problem is to spread out the loading of the DLLs as the process executes. Delay-load DLLs let you accomplish this easily.

• If you call a new function in your code and then try to run your application on an older version of the system in which the function does ...