Building an extension with VS2015

I needed to get a DLL prepared of my tiny closed format ranges extension, and so I tried following the excellent instructions Craig Ringer gave a couple of years ago. I was using Visual Studio 2015, on a Windows 10 box, targeting PostgreSQL 9.4, 64bit.

But I ran into some problems. I could compile the thing quite cleanly, but Postgres couldn't find the functions when I tried to create the extension. I had a short and very helpful email exchange with Craig, and came up with this solution: the exported functions needed to be declared with a prototype before the call to PG_FUNCTION_INFO_V1, and both the prototype and the function definition needed to be decorated with PGDLLEXPORT. Once I had done that, the DLL loaded when I ran "create extension", and the types worked as expected.

I don't know if this is required with any earlier versions of Visual Studio, or even of it works with them.  When I get a chance I will see if I can find out.

Based on this, I think it's probably worth trying at some stage to put together a script to build the project and solution files for extensions. I don't have time to do that right now, however.