I'm trying to get a handle on which DLLs my native mode C++ win32 application uses. This isn't always obvious - I can link a library but it's somewhat more difficult to find out which system DLLs are needed, particularly if they're system DLLs.
As a case in point, I recently sent a test build to a remote member of my team who's running an older version of windows.
his machine complained about
'api-ms-win-core-misc-l1-1-0.dll' being missing (I assume this had something to do with my using 'GetSystemTime' and related functions but that's part of my problem: how do I tell?) but seeing as this is a windows system file, how can I package up an installer that will ensure these files are installed?
Also, I've used dependency walker and 'listdlls.exe' to find all the DLLs used by my program but dependency walker can't load that DLL and 'listdlls' seems to silently ignore it, so I can't find their location in order to redistribute them (which feels like the wrong approach anyway).
My question therefore is what's the current best practice to:
comprehensively determine all the system DLLs that are used by my
application
write an installer that ensures these libraries are
installed on a users machine
Find out which redistributable installers are needed from a given list of DLLS
I would have thought that installing a visual studio redistributable
package (e.g.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads)
would be enough. To my knowledge, the team member has installed this
but still gets DLL issues.
Related
I developed a dll project with opencv and tesseract then I use it in C# WCF service project via CLR. When I try to import my dll in other computer, It give dependency error.
In my opinion, this error depends on used opencv and tesseract libs in dll. So how can I solve this issue ? I want to use this dll in other machines.
Use Dependency Walker utility to understand what dlls you should deliver with your application to the other computer.
On the other computer with this utility you can understand what dlls are missed.
You should inspect dependencies not only for your application, but also for OpenCV and Tesseract. These dlls dependent of MS VS Redistributable dlls which could also be missed on the target computer.
Nowadays it is best to create a setup for your installation containing all dependent DLL's
There are several free programs that make it simple to create a setup if you do not want to use the built in one in Visual Studio e.g. InnoSetup
I’m developing some Windows software that's sometimes used in embedded-like scenarios. That’s not uncommon for my users to have a dedicated Win7 or Win8 PC they never update, not even connect to the Internet. Users plug those PC to a specific industrial hardware, and use that system for one job only.
My software includes components I've written in Visual C++. I include CRT in my MSI packages using appropriate installer merge modules.
Unfortunately, for a PC that never updated, that doesn’t work: today I got a bug report, the app crashes on startup saying “can’t start because api-ms-win-crt-stdio-l1-1-0.dll is missing from your computer”
This answer suggests static link to CRT.
Did that. But some parts of my C++ code rely on OpenMP for parallelism.
Dependency walker shows me the DLL I’m building depends on vcomp140.dll even when compiled with Multi-threaded (/MT) runtime library settings.
Also it shows vcomp140.dll only depends on kernel32.dll and user32.dll.
Can I just place that single DLL, vcomp140.dll, in the installation folder? Will it work on offline Windows 7 PC?
Based on the VS2015 Redistribution List I would say that copying that file would be indeed what you need to do and would work fine (if you used VS2015 to build your app). Take care to copy the proper dll based on arm/x86/x64.
Just to make it clear, it is not possible to statically link openmp with Visual Studio. Only two things you can do:
Remove openmp (and compile with /MT /MTd)
deploy vcomp140.dll (or VC redistributable) with your application
I've been looking online and at my registry and I think not, but it would be nice if we could get a definitive answer on here.
Just the run time, as in for re-use on the client side.
I see it is possible for VC10, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2010/05/05/10008146.aspx, but prior to that we need to call the MsiQueryProductState API. Perhaps just give all the clients MSVCR100.DLL already?
The most common practice is to install the CRT your application was built with, regardless.
I think this practice comes from the v90 and lower CRTs, because there were multiple versions of each redistributable that could be installed, and though MSVCR90.DLL exists on the system, it may not be the version your application uses.
I believe this was changed with the v100 CRT, and now Microsoft guarantees that newer versions of the CRT will be usable in place of an older version, but I would still attempt to install the CRT your application was linked with.
It is still possible to do a private install of the Dll's into the application's folder. I recently installed 3 different version of the VC9 runtime when I was setting up my Visual Studio Express environments. All show up in Control Panel and appear to be readily removable.
For that reason I believe the current best practise to be to perform a private install (I think that is the terminolgy MS uses) of the required DLL's (for managed code you need the managed DLL and the native version) in tha app's folder.
I have been working on a VS 2005 project and have successfully generated an exe file which works fine on my system. However when I tried to run it on some other pc it didnt run. It throws up the error message "the system cannot run the specified program". Can someone tell me how to make my code immune to such message i.e. system independent?
platform used: Windows XP, VS 2005
the extension of all my code files is cpp but I know only c and thats what I wrote inside them.
I have seen before exe created on Windows Sp1 not working on SP2 and problems such as that.
This should help you perhaps.
I've seen this when you run on a different version of Windows that doesn't have some DLL you depend on. The easiest thing to do is statically link the C runtime (that's the usual culprit) and use depends.exe to see if there are any others.
You will almost certainly need to create an installer that installs your executable and any non-OS-included DLL's it relies upon. It is not always possible or desirable to statically link all dependencies. You can in many cases simply copy the DLL's to the same folder as the executable.
By default, even the C/C++ standard library is provided by a DLL. While the MSVCRT.DLL used by VC++ 6 is included with the OS since later editions Win95, the MSVCRT required by VS2005 is not included with XP installations (other versions I do not know). The run-time support is included VC redistributes package. You may need to arrange for your installer to include that installation, or you could be more selective is you know your dependencies.
Some Win32 API calls if you are using them are dependent on the OS version (check the documentation), but if you built and rin it on XP, it should normally work of any subsequent version of Windows. You need to define various API version macros if you want to extend support to earlier versions of Windows (which seems unlikley).
You might need to install the VS 2005 redistributables on the other machines, depending on how you have compiled your program.
Here's my configuration:
Computer A - Windows 7, MS Visual Studio 2005 patched for Win7 compatibility (8.0.50727.867)
Computer B - Windows XP SP2, MS Visual Studio 2005 installed (8.0.50727.42)
My project has some external dependencies (prebuilt DLLs - either build on A or downloaded from the Internet), a couple of DLLs built from sources and one executable. I am mostly developing on A and all is fine there. At some point I try to build my project on computer B, copying the prebuilt DLLs to the output folder. Everything builds fine, but trying to start my application I get
The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0150002)....
The event log contains two of those:
Dependent Assembly Microsoft.VC80.CRT could not be found and Last Error was The referenced assembly is not installed on your system.
plus the slightly more amusing
Generate Activation Context failed for
some.dll. Reference error message: The
operation completed successfully.
At this point I'm trying my Google-Fu, but in vain - virtually all hits are about running binaries on machines without Visual Studio installed. In my case, however, the executables fail to run on the computer they are built.
Next step was to try dependency walker and it baffled me even more - my DLLs built from sources on the same box cannot find MSVCR80.DLL and MSVCP80.DLL, however the executable seems to be alright in respect to those two DLLs i.e. when I open the executable with dependency walker it shows that the MSVC?80.DLLs can be found, but when I open one of my DLLs it says they cannot. That's where I am completely out of ideas what to do so I'm asking you, dear stackoverflow :)
I admit I'm a bit blurry on the whole side-by-side thing, so general reading on the topic will also be appreciated.
Your question has the answer to your problem: Computer A has VC runtime of version 8.0.50727.867, and Computer B has only version 8.0.50727.42.
You built your libraries on Computer A, and they depend on version 867 of VC runtime. (This can be found in manifest embedded in the libraries.) When you copy them to Computer B, these libraries still require version 867 of the runtime but you have only version 42.
To resolve the VC runtime assembly dependencies, you have to install VC runtime redistributables of version 867 on Computer B. However, I'd advise you to update Visual Studio on Computer B so that you have the same version on both computers. And even better, install Visual Studio 2005 SP1 on both computers and then install this security update to SP1. After installing the latter, your libraries will depend on version 8.0.50727.4053.
it's possible the problem is related with different versions of CRT runtime installed on both machines. is it possible to build all your modules to use statically linked CRT runtime to verify this?
first I'd check that prebuilt dlls by preparing dummy project to load them
I recently had the same type of error when building projects on one machine and then moving them to another machine. The biggest culprit here is likely a debug configuration for one of the binary components. That is, MSVC has the fairly rigid requirement of all DLLs/EXEs being built with the same runtime library, debug or release, otherwise they will not work together.
When I had this happen they also tend to compile just fine, but when you attempt to run them you get that extremely cryptic error message.
You need to ensure that every module you build together uses the same configuration, thus debug or release through the entire build chain. This error also likely comes up with mismatches in other libraries, so make sure your MSVC is the exact same version on the machines where you are building.