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

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

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.

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.)

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.

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?

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.

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

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...

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?

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?

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.

@Dark_Halmut

Are you running the lastest Version: 1.0.21115.0?

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.

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

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

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

hire Ludvig Strigeus.

Please explain how can this become DLL hell - reloaded?

TA.