Using MVS C++ 7.1 (2003): When developing a DLL I often have a "Debugger.exe" application within my DLL project's solution, as a project dependency of the DLL. This way I can easily test the DLL's progress without much hassle of linking/etc. Visual Studio provides a good number of features to make this process fairly simple, except for one step: copying updated DLLs (...\MyDll\Debug\MyDLL.dll and ...\MyDLL\Release\MyDLL.dll) to the local folders of the Debugger Application (...\App\Debug\ and ...\App\Release\). I have yet to find a very clean solution to this. Currently I have two batch files in the Applications folder (Debug.bat and Release.bat) which do the correct copy work. They are run as a Custom Build Event from the Application's project. This works fairly well, but can still cause developer DLL HELL occasionally. I thought there must be a better way... I'm curious what other people do?

Project Properites/General/Output Directory

I thought of changing the "Project Properites/Linker/General/Output File" right after I posted this. Both that and the entire "$(OutDir)" would work but it feels like the project loses its modularity when it clutters an external dependent up with its build files. It's also less obvious where to find the DLL when you want to use it for another application (not the "debugger" app). This is being picky of course. I'll survive.

Then change both projects to dump their outputs to the same directory not in either project tree.