ab2tc wrote: > I have tried to install this program, but it appears that unless one has VB > installed, one is out of luck. The first complaint was the missing > vbrun300.dll. I located this on the web and installed it the folder I tried
Note, if it is legal to download this from the web, in isolation, at all, the only place to download it from will be Microsoft themselves. Conversely, if you can't download it from Microsoft, it is almost certainly an illegal copy. > to install Cool from. Rerunning the setup, it's missing another dll file; I > forget the name. I suspect I could go on like this until I had found and > installed all files needed by the VB runtime system. Is there perhaps a > compiler switch or something that could be changed so that it would produce > an executable that is not dependent on other files? It does look a very nice > program to try out. Basically, no. Unless he rewrote it in C, using only basic Windows API capabilities, which would be a major job (many times the job of writing it originally) it is always going to require additional DLLs if it is to run on a wide range of versions of Windows. (He is actually writing using tools that haven't been supported by Microsoft for some years, but that does make it more likely to work on versions of Windows that are likely to still be in use but themselves haven't been supported for years.) Normally the development tools contain some files which are termed redistributables. These can be redistributed, free of charge, as long as they are included as part of a program that needs them, and the licence for that program gives adequate protection (e.g. not allowing them to be further redistributed, without the program, or to be reverse engineered). Assuming that he only used redistributable DLLs, he should have included those used in the setup package. A caveat, though, this age of tooling was particularly prone to a problem known as "DLL Hell" (Google it), which relates to having conflicting version requirements for DLLs, or different versions installed in different places. A commercial developer, writing a Windows only GUI program, these days, would probably use .NET. The DLLs needed for that should already be installed on Vista, and are, I think, installed on XP. A commercial developer simply wouldn't support 98 or ME, but to run the program on those, you would need to either include .NET framework redistributables, or the end user would need to install the full framework. (.NET programs tend to perform poorly on older machines and access to lower level functions, and other more technical features, often involves third party code (which would need its own redistributables to be supplied) or coding some parts against low level Windows interfaces, which requires a technically skilled programmer. Where I work, we have to use third party code just to access serial ports, although I think that might be because we need more than two ports - although serial ports seem to be considered obsolete by Microsoft, and the lowest levels of abstraction they really want to support, for normal programmers, is a TCP connection, although they might prefer it to be the .NET remote procedure call level) -- David Woolley "The Elecraft list is a forum for the discussion of topics related to Elecraft products and more general topics related ham radio" List Guidelines <http://www.elecraft.com/elecraft_list_guidelines.htm> _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: [email protected] You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
