title: How do you tell Visual Studio to compile an external library?
body: <p>I've never tried to use external libraries in a C++ project before so this might seem like an obvious question (I'm coming from a C# background)</p>
  
  <p>I want to use libcurl in my project, so I downloaded the source as a zip file <a href="http://curl.haxx.se/download.html" rel="nofollow">from here</a> and extracted the folder to my "libs" folder which Visual Studio knows to look in. I then included the header file like this: <code>#include &lt;curl\include\curl\curl.h&gt;</code>, and I know that works fine because it gives me the right parameter info etc.</p>
  
  <p>This is my main method:</p>
  
  <pre><code>int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
  {
      CURL *curl;
      curl = curl_easy_init();
      return 0;
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now the problem is, as soon as I try to compile the project, I get the error <code>unresolved external symbol __imp__curl_easy_init</code>. Now this makes sense because I never told Visual Studio to include any cpp files, just a .h file. How do I tell it where to look for the .cpp source files, and how do I know which files to include? </p>
  
  <p>(I do want to compile from the source code because I plan to build the project on linux later on)</p>