Tip for developing a liblas C++ program with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008

Recently I tried to write a C++ program for reading a LiDAR LAS file using Microsoft Visual Studio and the open source library liblas. I followed the sample tutorial from the liblas.org web site. The simple code below simply opens up a LAS file and creates a LASReader class. Compiling the simple code is okay but when I ran it, the program crashed when trying to create the LASReader class. What was the problem?

 // liblas  
 #include <liblas/liblas.hpp>  
 #include <liblas/laspoint.hpp>  
 #include <liblas/lasreader.hpp>  
 #include <liblas/cstdint.hpp>  
 #include <fstream>  
 #include <iostream>  
 #include <string>  
 int main(int argc, char* argv[])  
 {  
   std::ifstream ifs;  
   ifs.open( "c:\\temp\\input.las", std::ios::in | std::ios::binary);   
   liblas::LASReader reader(ifs);  
 }  

The source code is simple enough and the syntax is correct. After some research I found out that the liblas.lib file I was linking was a released (non-debug) version while I was compiling a debug version of my C++ executable. Due to licensing issues, libLAS can only be distributed in released version. If you want to compile a debug executable, then you have to download the liblas source code and compile your own debug liblas.lib. Otherwise, you can only build release copies of your executable.