“Unresolved external symbol” Errors when Compiling CGAL 4.7 Under Windows with Visual Studio 2013

I spent hours trying to compile CGAL 4.7 with Visual Studio 2013. Everything compiled on the first try with Visual Studio 2010 but for some reason I was unable to get it working with VS2013. CMake would create the solution files just fine and was able to resolve everything. However, when I attempted to build the confiugured solution I would get lots of “unresolved external” errors like this:

unresolved external symbol "__declspec(dllimport) class boost::system::error_category const & __cdecl boost::system::generic_category(void)

I followed this guide to the letter. I was sure Boost was being discovered just fine. I had everything in my PATH. After a while I figured out what my problem was! Although I wanted to build 64-bit binaries, I was selecting Visual Studio 12 2013 as my generator!! I was skimming every time I was selecting it so I wasn’t paying attention! I should’ve in fact selected Visual Studio 12 2013 Win64 as my generator. Doing that solved the problems.