Why is it that whenever a new version of Visual Studio comes out and you take a C++ project and migrate it and you simply recompile it the size of the project nearly doubles?

I’ve been thinking about moving a handful of small Win32 DLL utlility libraries to VS2005 to get better editing support and also to slowly fade out usage of VS 2003 (there’s not much left).

But with C++ code every upgrade of VS seems to incur a MAJOR library size hit in every migration especially in small libraries. I seem to remember the same thing happening in moving to VS 2003 from 2002 and Visual Studio 6 before that. It turns out that in most cases there are compiler settings and switches that can get the size down somewhat (though I’ve never been able to reduce the size of these DLLs to the same size as the previous VS version EVER).

So I have a DLL library that was 46k that is now 76k. Another library was 76k that is now 138k. Any of you C++ folks have any quick fix hints that you can think of? I looked over the various compiler options and optimizations and frankly I can’t find anything that makes any difference in the compiled image size.

I'll qualify this right out that my C++ knowledge is limited especially when dealing with compiler settings, which is why this is so damn frustrating. <g>