How to remove msvc dlls (example: msvcr100.dll) dependency to run qt appliation?
I've developed a qt application which runs just fine in dveloper machine but unable to run on any other machine gives error message "program can't start because MSVCR100.dll is missing from your computer". I can solve this error by copying that file in the application folder but I dont want to copy, instead I want to link statically or some other way to remove that dependency.
Thanks in advance
The issue is that you are probably trying to run an application on a machine which has a different Visual Studio (MSVC) version installed than the version that was used for building your application itself.
Generally, the correct solution is to install the corresponding Visual Studio redistributable package on the target machine. It is not a "workaround" or "hack" because if you wish to use an application built with different runtime libraries, etc, then it is expected. Here you can read a bit more about it:
Redistributing Visual C++ Files
Yes, it is a bit unfortunate, and apparently MS has not managed to make it the most ideal, but after all, it is simple enough to circumvent. Note that the target machine would not only have issues with your application, but in general with any distributed in a similar fashion.
The other way to solve the issue is to build the application with the same environment that is installed on the target machine, but this can easily go haywire if you need to supply the application to several machines with versatile setup. Now, I would say this is the "hackish" approach.
You will need to grab the redistributable for this particular problem from here:
Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x86)
Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x64)
Even if you went down for statically hacking this around somehow, you would need to deal with nasty consequences when using your application with DLLs and static libraries, etc.
As far as I know, you can't link statically to Visual Studio Redistributable. Any application built with Visual Studio Compiler needs the corresponding msvcXXX.dll to run. Installers containing all dll for each specific version of MSVC are available here: http://search.microsoft.com/en-us/DownloadResults.aspx?q=redistributable
If you want avoid errors for your users when you distribute your application, you have some solution. A commonly used is to install the right redistributable package before installing your application on the user machine. Often used tools (NSIS, Inno Setup, etc.) have options to run other executable in the process. And each Microsoft redist package can be run silently (without any window display to user).
Note: This problem is absolutely not related to qt. It comes directly from the compiler you choose.
Related
I'm very new to GUI programming in c++, thus I don't have that much experience.
I created myself a GUI for my programm using the Visual Studio 2017 CRL package and now I'm trying to make this exe available for everyone.
The application works fine for those who have Visual Studio or VC Runtime installed but for those who don't the programm throws something like: "vcruntime140.dll is missing on your computer to run this app".
I am not sure how to link these dll's in my programm so that EVERYONE is able to use it.
I'm also not quit sure how I would link dll's.
There's basically two options.
The Standard in the industry is to ship the Visual Studio 20xx Runtime Redistributable Installer alongside your program, and have it run before anyone tries to run your program themselves, to make sure that the .dll files are installed onto the target computer.
The other option is to change the way that the libraries are linked to the executable at compile-time. This is done with a flag in Visual Studio:
Basically, you want to change the Runtime Library field to either say Multi-Threaded or Multi-Threaded Debug depending on whether you're in Release or Debug mode, as opposed to "Multi-Threaded DLL", which is the default.
Note, however, that you need to make sure that every single library you're using was compiled the same way: if any of them were compiled using the DLL version of the Runtime Library, they'll interoperate with your code in funny ways, and the least of your problems will be that they'll need the DLLs installed anyways, defeating your effort.
Naturally, that's not an issue if all your libraries are Header-Only, but if any of them have been compiled, then you'll need to recompile them using the correct settings.
You need to install Visual Studio 2017 redistribuables on the machine (that's how it works for every version of Visual Studio).
However, I could not find any official link on Microsoft website (probably because this is not officially released yet)....
You probably need to use 2015 version (for which redistribuables are available here) and wait for 2017 to become an official release.
So i'm fairly new to VS and coding and I've recently made a small snake game in a C++ console application project, which works fine but i would like to get it to work on another PC without VS. The closest i have found to answering my question were these other StackOverflow questions here and here. i have installed the vs installer projects extension to try make it a setup project and include the required dependencies but i cant work out how to do this. Does anyone have any info to guide me through my last step of this problem or am i completely on the wrong track?
If the application uses dynamic runtime (which is the default), it uses the VS DLL files. To provide them, the Visual Studio Runtime Redistributable for that particular VS version needs to be installed on the target machine (as mentioned in your second link).
So that means you need to setup the installer that way. I didn't use it, but there might be some options that the resulting setup can either contain or download and install the VS redistributable automatically.
See also here: How to install redistributable with visual studio setup? (but it is for VS 2013, there might be some changes in 2015)
Well, you don't tell us what kind of project your C++ console app is...
Using only C++, your app can be built with different versions of the CRT, like for instance:
V120 (VS-2013)
V120_XP (VS-2013 w/ XP support)
V140 (VS-2015)
V140_XP (VS-2015 w/ XP support)
Even on VS 2015, you can choose the version of the CRT you want, and use an older version, if needed.
Anyway, the target computer will need the DLLs for the correct CRT version.
Microsoft provides them. You can either ship them with your product, if you have a custom installer, or use the installer provided by Microsoft.
MSDN - Determining Which DLLs to Redistribute
For instance, using V120:
msvcp120.dll
msvcr120.dll
Your project might also use .NET.
In such a case, you also need to install the correct version in the host machine.
I'm coming from a Linux background, but I'd like to provide a version of my software on Windows. For users to run my program, they will need the Visual C++ redistributable. I would like to provide it for them as part of the package.
My worry is that there, in the future, will be an SP2 of the Visual Studio 2008 Redistributable. If I provide them SP1, or ask them to install it themselves, will it clobber later versions of the dll's that may be required by future tools?
Is there any instruction to give users to make sure they do not do this?
I'd certainly not want to screw up someone's machine or other applications by giving them incorrect instructions.
Aside from the redistributable exe, I was going to provide my tool as a zip file which they can extract into any directory they please, so I was not planning on providing an installer.
With VS 2008 the runtimes are manifested and will install side-by-side. So if your application is linked to SP1's runtime, it will run only with the SP1 runtime (unless a manifest explicitly indicates that the Sp1 version should be overridden).
So you're protected from that type of DLL hell, in exchange for another (the user must have the SP1 redistributable installed).
Why don't you statically link and avoid this problem altogether?
The VC++ redistributables are meant to be installed side-by-side and can coexist peacefully.
Here's a page from the MSDN docs about the VC++ redistributables. That whole Deployment section of MSDN should be instructive.
As people said, they're installed side-by-side. If you use Visual Studio's installer project type, there's an option for including the CRT redistributable, and it will set it up properly for you to be installed and uninstalled with your application.
In particular, they're installed to the \Windows\WinSxS directory.
To get an intuition for how side-by-side works, do
cd %systemroot%\winsxs
dir /S msvc*.dll
And you will see all the versions people have put on your machine.
My C(++) program, written and compiled using Visual C(++)/Visual Studio, runs fine on my own machine, but refuses to run on another machine. The error message I get is "This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem."
If you write a C++ program, it links dynamically to the C Runtime Library, or CRT for short. This library contains your printf, your malloc, your strtok, etcetera. The library is contained in the file called MSVCR80.DLL. This file is not by default installed on a Windows system, hence the application cannot run.
The solution? Either install the DLL on the target machine through VCREDIST.EXE (the Visual C++ Redistributable Package), or link to the CRT statically (plug the actual code for the used functions straight into your EXE).
Distributing and installing VCREDIST along with a simple application is a pain in the arse, so I went for the second option: static linking. It's really easy: go to your project's properties, unfold C/C++, click Code Generation, and set the Runtime Library to one of the non-DLL options. That's all there is to it.
The problem here is a missing DLL dependency, such as the CRT (C Runtime Library). A good tool for diagnosing this sort of problem is Dependency Walker (depends.exe), which you can find here:
http://www.dependencywalker.com/
You would run this program on the computer that generates the error message you posted, and use it to open the exe that's generating this error. Dependency Walker will quickly and graphically indicate any DLLs that are required but not available on the machine.
Chances are high that you miss the runtime libraries of Visual Studio (CRT amongst others), you can either get rid of those dependencies (link statically) or install the VC redist packages on the target computer.
Depending on the Visual C++ version you use, you have to install different packages :
Visual C++ 2005
Visual C++ 2005 SP1
Visual C++ 2008
Warning : those packages only contain release versions of the libraries, if you want to be able to distribute debug builds of your application you'll have to take care of the required DLL yourself.
It is much the simplest to link to the runtime statically.
c++ -> Code Generation -> Runtime Library and select "multi-threaded /MT"
However, this does make your executable a couple hundred KByte larger. This might be a problem if you are installing a large number of small programs, since each will be burdened by its very own copy of the runtime. The answer is to create an installer.
New project -> "setup and deployment" -> "setup project"
Load the output from your application projects ( defined using the DLL version of the runtime ) into the installer project and build it. The dependency on the runtime DLL will be noticed, included in the installer package, and neatly and unobtrusively installed in the correct place on the target machine.
The correct VC Redist package for you is part of your Visual Studio installation. For VC 8, you can find it here:
\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\BootStrapper\Packages\vcredist_x86
POSSIBLE SOLUTION........
EDIT: (removed most of my post)
Long story short, I was having similar problems, getting the "Application Configuration Incorrect" messages, etc etc.
Depends.exe was only finding ieshims.dll and wer.dll as possible issues, but this is not the problem.
I ended up using the Multithreaded (/mt) compile option.
What HAS worked though, as a workable solution, is making an installer with InstallShield.
I've selected several merge modules in installshield builder and this seems to have fixed my problem. The modules selected were:
VC++ 9.0 CRT, VC++ 9.0 DEBUG CRT, and the CRT WinSXS MSM merge module.
I'm pretty sure its the WinSXS merge module that has fixed it.
DEBUG CRT: I noticed somewhere that (no matter how hard I tried, and obviously failed thus far), my Release version still depended on the DEBUG CRT. If this is still the case, the InstallShield merge module has now placed the DEBUG CRT folder in my WinSXS folder :) Being somewhat of a novice with VC++ I assume that this would normally be used to distribute debug versions of your programs to other people. To test if this is what fixed my problem I removed the DEBUG CRT folder from the WinSXS folder and the application still worked. (Unless something is still running in the background etc etc - I'm not that into it)
Anyway, this has got things working for me on an XP SP3 fully updated machine, and also on a VMWare XP SP3 machine with the bare bones (.net 3.5 and VC++ 2008 RTM basically) - and also on a mate's XP machine where it previously wasn't working.
So give these things a try, you might have some luck.
First thing you must use
#define _BIND_TO_CURRENT_VCLIBS_VERSION 1
or add _BIND_TO_CURRENT_VCLIBS_VERSION=1 to the preprocessor directives.
The problem is related to binding and the manifest types, you can find more http://www.nuonsoft.com/blog/2008/10/29/binding-to-the-most-recent-visual-studio-libraries/
By doing this your application will run with a larger range of runtime libraries versions.
Often times this error is the result of attempting to run the debug version of an application that uses .NET. Since the .NET redistributable package doesn't include the debug versions of the dlls that are installed with Visual Studio, your application will often get this error when running it on any other machine that doesn't have Visual Studio installed. If you haven't already, try building a release version of your application and see if that works.
Note also - that if you change to static runtime, you will have to do the same for MFC if your app uses MFC. Those settings are in properties->Configuration/General
I ran into this problem and was able to fix it very simply.
Visual studio gives you the option (on by default) to build a manifest for each build.
The manifest was put in the release folder, but it was a different release folder than the exe.
Even when using the setup utilities it was not packaged.
You should look for a file names something like myprogram.exe.indermediate.manifest
If this is in the same folder as the exe (and you have all the dlls) it should run
After compiling a simple C++ project using Visual Studio 2008 on vista, everything runs fine on the original vista machine and other vista computers. However, moving it over to an XP box results in an error message: "The application failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect".
What do I have to do so my compiled EXE works on XP and Vista? I had this same problem a few months ago, and just fiddling with some settings on the project fixed it, but I don't remember which ones I changed.
You need to install the Visual Studios 2008 runtime on the target computer:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9b2da534-3e03-4391-8a4d-074b9f2bc1bf&displaylang=en
Alternatively, you could also link the run time statically, in the project properties window go to:
c++ -> Code Generation -> Runtime
Library and select "multi-threaded
/MT"
You need to install the runtime redistributable files onto the machine you are trying to run the app on.
The redistributable for 2008 is here.
The redistributable for 2005 is here.
They can be installed side-by-side, in case you need both.
You probably need to distribute the VC runtime with your application. There are a variety of ways to do this. This article from the Microsoft Visual C++ Team best explains the different ways to distribute these dependencies if you are using Visual Studio 2005 or 2008.
As stated in the article, though you can download the Redistributable installer package and simply launch that on the client machine, that is almost always not the optimal option. There are usually better ways to include the required DLLs such as including the merge module if you are distributing via Windows Setup or App-Local copy if you just want to distribute a zipped folder.
Another option is to statically link against the runtime libraries, instead of distributing them with your application. This option is only suitable for standalone EXEs that do not load other DLLs. You also cannot do this with DLLs that are loaded by other applications.
It is much the simplest to link to the runtime statically.
c++ -> Code Generation -> Runtime Library and select "multi-threaded /MT"
However, this does make your executable a couple hundred KByte larger. This might be a problem if you are installing a large number of small programs, since each will be burdened by its very own copy of the runtime. The answer is to create an installer.
New project -> "setup and deployment" -> "setup project"
Load the output from your application projects ( defined using the DLL version of the runtime ) into the installer project and build it. The dependency on the runtime DLL will be noticed, included in the installer package, and neatly and unobtrusively installed in the correct place on the target machine.
Visual studio 2005 actually has two
The one for the original release
and the one for SP1