How can I link to the Debug and Release libraries easily in Visual Studio 2008?

[robin wen]

Hi all,

I'm developing my application with Visual Studio 2008. I've already installed Connector-C 6.0.2 win32 and Connector-C++ 1.1.0 win32. Two sub-directories exist within the "MySQL Connector C++ 1.1.0\lib" folder: "debug" and "opt". I think the "debug" contains the Debug library files and "opt" contains the Release library files.

In my computer environment variables I currently set the "debug" path to the PATH variable so when my application of DEBUG version is loading it could find the desired .lib files.

However, I notic the library files in these two folders have the same file names: mysqlcppconn.lib and mysqlcppconn-static.lib, unlike that most of products nowadays append the Debug library files with an additional "d".

My question is: Does this mean that I can't link to the other version of connector library without changing the computer environment variable??

I want to build both Debug and Release of my application and test them. It's very easy to change the configuration in Visual Studio but I found I have to change the computer environment variable each time I build the Release version. Is there an easier way to do so?