Where can I get information about the C/C++ linker in Visual Studio?

Question

I'd like to learn more about C/C++ linker issues and troubleshooting in Visual Studio. I've had linker problems crop up from time to time and they are really annoying since you get such limited information from the linker error messages. I've seen a few not-so-detailed MSDN articles but nothing in depth.

Where can I find a good source for linker information? Maybe a book, website or some in-depth blog posts? Are there useful utilities to aid linker troubleshooting out there? Browsing around with dumpbin is somewhat less than satisfying.

Answer 1

For a general understanding of linkers, read the book “Linkers and loaders”. You can read it online: http://www.iecc.com/linker/.

I think that an in-depth look into Windows executables alone will be very useful:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc301805.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc301808.aspx

And of course, the documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y0zzbyt4.aspx.