I've updated the advice on using BOOST_CLASS_EXPORT. The new advice is described in the documentation in the trunk. This will require moving some macros between source modules (*.cpp and *.hpp files).
In exchange, you'll get
a) a more carefully thought out way to handle exports. b) the ability to include serialization code in DLLS with little or no suprises. c) serialization code will be thread safe - without any locking required.
Robert, I've read the new documentation and while it fixes the compilation errors, I still get runtime unregistered_class exceptions. Here's my general setup, briefly. MyClass.h ------- class MyClass : public SomeBase { .... }; MyClassSZ.h --------- #include <MyClass.h> template<Archive> void serialize( Archive&, MyClass&, ... ) ClassSZ.cpp ----------- #include <MyClassSZ.h> #include <boost/archive/...> // All archive types I'm going to use #include <boost/serialization/export.hpp> BOOST_CLASS_EXPORT(MyClass); void serialize( Archive&, MyClass&, unsigned int ) { // perform serialization. No void_cast_register is done // because I *always* serialize via a base class pointer. // also, I do not serialize the base object as there is // no data in it. } // Explicitly instantiate above function for each archive type template void serialize<xml_iarchive>(xml_iarchive&, MyClass&, unsigned int); template void serialize<xml_oarchive>(xml_iarchive&, MyClass&, unsigned int); // ... etc. ---------------------------------------- All of my ClassSZ.cpp files are compiled and statically linked into a library. Then, in the application: main.cpp -------- #include ... // archive type that I want #include <MyClassSZ.h> // Create archive and serialize a MyClass via SomeBase ptr) ---------------------------------------- Is it a possibility that the linker is not linking in the guid_initializer code? For this particular build type, I'm not even doing optimizations... let alone link-time code generation. This is on MSVC80. Thanks, Dan