Comment Feed for Channel 9 - Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

sakisp — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 23:20:04 GMT

Interesting but overcomplicated guidelines that nobody knows, reads or follows.
Thanks anyway

posted by sakisp

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

Charles — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 23:55:17 GMT

sakisp wrote:

Interesting but overcomplicated guidelines that nobody knows, reads or follows.
Thanks anyway

Interesting point of view. I don't agree, however. Follow these guidelines! They will save you from much grief...
C

posted by Charles

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

sakisp — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 06:29:33 GMT

Charles wrote:

Interesting point of view. I don't agree, however. Follow these guidelines! They will save you from much grief...

I do that Charles whenever is possible, but I was not talking about me.
Most of the software industry "big-names" (not to mention 99% of shareware vendors), ignore these guidelines when designing their products deployment.

posted by sakisp

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

graboy — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:24:42 GMT

Sorry but you've managed to make the process of distributing .dlls harder and less reliable than it ever has been.

(SXS will likely join the registry and UAC in the legendary "it sounded good on paper" pile.)

posted by graboy

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

odujosh — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:30:47 GMT

sakisp wrote:

Charles wrote:
Interesting point of view. I don't agree, however. Follow these guidelines! They will save you from much grief...

I do that Charles whenever is possible, but I was not talking about me.
Most of the software industry "big-names" (not to mention 99% of shareware vendors), ignore these guidelines when designing their products deployment.

Wow you must be a busy guy working with so many companies to make such generalizations. So do you hop companies every week. Or are you making something up to have a point. I vote for the latter.

posted by odujosh

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

giovanni — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:15:58 GMT

Just out of curiosity, what approach deos Mac OS X uses (I know they don't have dlls, but they still heave lilbraries, etc.)?

Do they link everything in the binaries? How are updates taken care of in that case?

posted by giovanni

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

FluffyDevilBunny — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:54:16 GMT

MacOS does use dlls or sos. It gives the appearance that they don't exist because the application you are clicking on is actually a directory with an extension of .app. Everything the application depends on is in the directory so when you drag it around places, everything goes with it. As for shared dlls, they are stored in the library directory. The application contains a manifest that tells it which libraries it relies on. Its all very simple.

posted by FluffyDevilBunny

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

DouglasH — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:45:19 GMT

FluffyDevilBunny wrote:

MacOS does use dlls or sos. It gives the appearance that they don't exist because the application you are clicking on is actually a directory with an extension of .app. Everything the application depends on is in the directory so when you drag it around places, everything goes with it. As for shared dlls, they are stored in the library directory. The application contains a manifest that tells it which libraries it relies on. Its all very simple.

so in theory MacOS can still suffer from dll hell unless the library directory stores multiple versions of the Library.

Douglash

posted by DouglasH

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

giovanni — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:56:49 GMT

FluffyDevilBunny wrote:

MacOS does use dlls or sos. It gives the appearance that they don't exist because the application you are clicking on is actually a directory with an extension of .app. Everything the application depends on is in the directory so when you drag it around places, everything goes with it. As for shared dlls, they are stored in the library directory. The application contains a manifest that tells it which libraries it relies on. Its all very simple.

Well, it does not look substantially different from Windows...

posted by giovanni

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

sakisp — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:12:39 GMT

odujosh wrote:

Wow you must be a busy guy working with so many companies to make such generalizations. So do you hop companies every week. Or are you making something up to have a point. I vote for the latter.

No, I'm not a "busy guy working with many companies". I'm just a regular tech guy who has deployed hundreds of commercial applications during my life. Do you think it's too difficult to recognize a messed up installation?

posted by sakisp

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

Jsoh — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 06:31:00 GMT

When the Office Ribbon updates comes, being off band, will there be another VC redist? And why is producing ClickOnce deployments so complicated for native C++ apps? It's not like disk space is an issue... Is disk space an issue?

posted by Jsoh

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

Dark_Halmut — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 19:12:10 GMT

These silverlight players are killing me. Everytime I load channel9 my entire ie locks, even other tabs for near 30 seconds just to load that picture. Its really an unacceptable freeze. Can't you guys load the page and then load the player in an AJAX panel so I can continue other tasks?

sry, its been getting on my nerves since channel9 switched players. I appreciate your efforts.

posted by Dark_Halmut

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

Jsoh — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:50:37 GMT

@Dark_Halmut

Are you running the lastest Version: 1.0.21115.0?

posted by Jsoh

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

cheong — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 03:00:00 GMT

DouglasH wrote:

FluffyDevilBunny wrote:
MacOS does use dlls or sos. It gives the appearance that they don't exist because the application you are clicking on is actually a directory with an extension of .app. Everything the application depends on is in the directory so when you drag it around places, everything goes with it. As for shared dlls, they are stored in the library directory. The application contains a manifest that tells it which libraries it relies on. Its all very simple.

so in theory MacOS can still suffer from dll hell unless the library directory stores multiple versions of the Library.

Douglash

Linux systems (I believe it's also in most *nix systems) store the dynamic link libraries in /lib and /usr/lib. with .so(dynamic-linked) or .a(static-linked) in extension.

And they put the version number at the end of the file. Then provide symbolic link to the filename without version in extension as the current version.

======

So you'll see:

libsomething.so -> libsomething.so.4.3.3
libsomething.so.3 -> libsomething.so.3.1.0
libsomething.so.4 -> libsomething.so.4.3.3
libsomething.so.3.1.0
libsomething.so.4.3.1
libsomething.so.4.3.3

In some system that doesn't use package management systems.

======

Note that on most systems, some of these libraries are left behind intensionally for backward compatibility reasons. (e.g.: the *-compat packages)

If you install an application that requires previous version of glibc runtime, just install the current version of glibc-compat and you'll get all the previous versions of glibc-runtime. That's how they solve the DLL hell problem.

posted by cheong

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

littleguru — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:17:42 GMT

offtopic follows:

Dark_Halmut wrote:

These silverlight players are killing me. Everytime I load channel9 my entire ie locks, even other tabs for near 30 seconds just to load that picture. Its really an unacceptable freeze. Can't you guys load the page and then load the player in an AJAX panel so I can continue other tasks?

sry, its been getting on my nerves since channel9 switched players. I appreciate your efforts.

You can op out... Go to your profile -> settings and disable silverlight for the player.

posted by littleguru

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

Frank Hileman — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 14:54:58 GMT

Thanks, littleguru. I assumed we were being forced to use a technology.

posted by Frank Hileman

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

benjaman — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 23:15:16 GMT

Josh - when we ship QFEs and SPs, we update all redist mechanisms, including app-local DLLs, MSMs and VCRedist*.exe as part of the patch to Visual Studio. I believe we will do the same for the MFC update (although, since it is in the future, I can't say with exact certainty that it will be that way, but that's the current plan as far as I know).

-Ben

posted by benjaman

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

glebd — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 14:42:44 GMT

Another sad example of how Microsoft manages to overcomplicate things. This is DLL hell, reloaded.

posted by glebd

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

Ted.dot — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:56:56 GMT

hire Ludvig Strigeus.

posted by Ted.dot

Re: Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

mrblob — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 17:55:49 GMT

Please explain how can this become DLL hell - reloaded?

TA.

posted by mrblob