We recently upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 from 2005, and I think those error started after that.

In our solution, we have a multitude of projects. Many of those are utility projects, or projects containing core functionality used by other projects. The output of those is lib files that are linked to when building the projects generating the final binaries using the "Project dependencies..." option.

One of the other projects---Let us call it ResultLib---generates a DLL, and it needs one single function from the core project. This function uses only static function from its own source file, but the project in its entirety uses a lot of low-level Windows functions and also imports a DLL---Let us call it Driver.dll.

Our problem is that when building ExtLib, the linker complains about a multitude of unresolved externals, for example all functions exported from Driver.dll, since its lib file is not specified when linking. If we try to fix this by adding all lib files used by other projects that use all of the core project, our resulting ResultLib DLL ends up importing Driver.dll and also exporting all functions defined in it.

How do we tell Visual Studio to only try to resolve symbols that are actually used?