Stop creating .lib and .exp when creating .dll with Visual Studio

Question

I am creating a .dll using the Visual Studio Toolkit (2008). When I do the binding step:

link -nologo -OUT:Foo.dll Foo.obj -DLL -IMPLIB:None.lib 

This creates None.lib and None.exp. It also displays a message:

 Creating library None.lib and object None.exp 

I would like to suppress the creation of these two files and the message associated with it. The message is annoying and makes it harder to view more useful messages in the build log. Files are not particularly large, but they contribute to hard disk traffic and file fragmentation.

I tried looking for flags that I can pass into the link, with no luck. I also tried setting -IMPLIB: nul, but this fails because it first tries to read with nul.exp.

Answer 1

There are no flags that you can pass LINK to prevent creating an import library or exporting a file.

I suggest you just ignore the message.