No matter how many years you spend on software development, this particular situation always seems to emerge. I have spent the last 3 hours trying to figure out why my code is not working. I am writing an Eclipse plugin (actually an Eclipse RCP application) for Bayesian inference, and I need to use a native dll that belong to the inference library I am using.

How hard can it be? Well either I am not at my brightest day today, or configuring a reference to a native dll is rediciolusly hard. There are about a zillion parameters you can set, and after working on zillion of them, what seems to be working is to follow the steps below

create a libs folder for jars in the eclipse project

copy native dll next to jar in this folder, and set native dependencies property of jar from build path

add jars to plugin class path from runtime tab in plugin.xml

Have a cup of coffee, and try to calm down.