For developers using `Microsoft Visual Studio`, you may download using the Windows build instructions, or you may download the pre-built netCDF-C libraries from this page.
> For complex builds that include netCDF-4 and/or DAP support this may prove tricky, as it is time consuming to collect all of the dependencies. In these cases it may be easier to use the pre-built `netcdf` packages provided by the `MSYS` and `Cygwin` environments.
These libraries have been built using Visual Studio 2012. The downloads are installer packages which contain the netCDF-C libraries and utilities (ncgen, ncgen3, ncdump and nccopy), as well as the associated dependencies.
In order to use the netcdf libraries, you must ensure that the .dll files (along with any dependencies from deps/shared/bin) are on the system path. In order to compile a program using these libraries, you must first link your program against the appropriate 'import' (.lib) libraries.
1. When building the netCDF-C libraries with netCDF4 support, using the `Debug` libraries may cause extraneous warnings. These warnings are related to cross-dll memory management, and appear to be harmless. You can safely ignore them by using the `Release` libraries. [NCF-220]