Okay, I've been struggling with this for full last couple of hours. I have a Windows 7 32-bit installation, on which I'm trying to compile some old code. I do not have any working knowledge of VB, but I'm trying to build a VB6 project which is part of the code base. The code compiles and when I run it after full-compile, it runs. But I can't seem to find where this file is. Task manager shows VB6 as process. It is not present in %TEMP%, and not in my project directory. Running an exhaustive search on my single drive configuration, I can find only one entry by this name, and this file has a timestamp older than current time. I attempted delete on this one while the debugger was still on breakpoint and it succeeded. As last resort in prefetch directory, I deleted that entry also, but magically this file still runs when on VB6. What must have been going on?
When you run an application within the VB6 IDE, it entirely runs within the VB6 IDE. Unlike some other languages, it isn't creating an executable file and then running it separately while hooking a debugger up, it just starts running your code using the VB interpreter.
To create a standalone .exe file, you need to create it separately. In the "File" menu, choose "Make projectname.exe". For full details, see "Making and Running an Executable File" in the Visual Basic 6 Concepts guide.
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I have a fairly large application (~750k LOC) that I distribute using the Package and Deployment Wizard. I fully understand that it would be nice to migrate to .NET (that ain't happening - see the code size above), and that the PDW is deeply flawed. However, for the most part I've made it work well for my end users, by customizing the Setup1 application, writing a menu-driven wrapper for the Setup application, and by running it in silent mode. (Note that the problem I'm about to describe occurred even before I started using silent mode.)
The issue I'm having is that my application requires quite a few auxiliary files, which I've added to the PDW project in the "Included files" section. When a user does a clean installation (either from scratch, or after un-installing a previous installation), everything works fine. However, if they simply run the installer to update the existing installation, the executable file and any OCXs I've updated get copied over the previous versions just fine, but my auxiliary files don't - I have to have the user manually delete them, and then the Setup1 program will re-install them as it should.
I've checked in the Setup.lst file, and all of the files are listed there, with their current date stamps. In fact, in my "BuildAll.bat" file, I do the Windows equivalent of a "touch" (copy /b "TheFile.dat" +,,) to force the date stamp to be current. However, if the file exists on the target machine, it won't be over-written even though it's older. There are no errors reported, either visibly or in the .LOG file (which is required if using the silent option).
A couple of additional points: Some of the auxiliary files are themselves VB6 applications - just the .exe files. Those do get copied correctly if they're newer than the existing files. Other than being files with internal versioning information, there's no difference between them and the other auxiliary files (which are things like media files, or text-based .txt or .dat files).
So, what's going on, and how do I fix it (besides moving to Inno or some other solution that won't work for me...)? Thanks in advance for any help!
~~
Mark Moulding
When you try to run a program on Windows, and the loader can't find all of the required DLLs, the default behavior is to pop up a dialog box that describes the problem, including both the name of the program and the name of (one of the) missing DLLs. The process then hangs until someone clicks OK, and then exits with an error code. Here's an example of this dialog box:
Now suppose you're scripting some automated process that might fail for this reason, e.g. running CI tests after installation, where part of the point is to make sure the installer installs all the DLLs. You don't want your build workers to hang waiting for someone to click on a dialog box that's being displayed on a monitor that the computer physically does not have because it's in a server rack somewhere. You want the test cycle to stop immediately and the details to get written to the log.
Your build driver can disable this dialog box for itself and all its child processes (assuming nobody uses CREATE_DEFAULT_ERROR_MODE) by calling SetErrorMode:
SetErrorMode(SEM_FAILCRITICALERRORS | SEM_NOGPFAULTERRORBOX | SEM_NOOPENFILEERRORBOX);
hProc = CreateProcess(...);
However, this only solves half of the problem. The offending process will terminate with an exit status of 0xC0000135 (STATUS_DLL_NOT_FOUND), but the name of the problem executable and the name of the missing DLL are not reported anywhere that I can find it.
So here's the actual question: From code running in the build driver, how do I get the name of the problem executable and the name of the missing DLL, so that I can write them to my CI build logs? Anything goes, except that the code of the problem executable itself and its DLLs cannot be modified (because this is supposed to be a general solution) and an approach that does not require elevated privileges is strongly preferred.
(This is a follow-up question for Suppress "The program can't start because X.dll is missing" error popup . I've been vaguely meaning to write it for years now.)
Even though it's a little overkill, you could write a program/script that parses the PE format of each executable, walks its import table to enumerate imported modules, and checks to see if each module exists on the system (i.e. is it in \Windows\System32, the current directory, etc).
Then, if the executable in question is missing an import, log the executable and the missing import somewhere (and don't run the executable, of course).
If you want to do this in Python, the pefile module is excellent (https://pypi.org/project/pefile/).
(Update: This won't work for DLLs that are imported via LoadLibrary)
I am working on a legacy (20 years plus) code base and doing the development in MSDEV 2010. The code is not built in MSDEV, it is done via a batch file using nmake.
I have created an empty windows project in MSDEV and pointed it at the relevant binaries. This works, I can either attach to the exe when it is running or run it in debug from the start - breakpoints, stepping etc all work.
However, I cannot use F12 to lookup the definition of things. When I press it I just get told it cannot find the definition. I have tried adding the files in but that does not seem to help.
Anyone know how I can set this up?
It was far easier than I thought. There is a separate option in 2010 to create a project from existing code.
I simply created the project and added the code from the root of my source tree. Intellisense now works (as does Phat Studio).
I am now trying to figure out how to set the build system up within MSDEV!
I've written a command-line OpenCL compiler. I'd like to have VS compile my kernel source files using this whenever I build the C# project that includes them. I've looked around and found information and custom build tasks, custom tools, etc, but I haven't been able to get it to work correctly.
How can I tell VS to run my exe on the source files in the same way that it runs the c# compiler, etc for other files in the project?
I report errors from this tool by calling Console.Error.WriteLine(). This dutifully places the errors in the Output pane, where I can double-click them, taking me to the appropriate place in the .cl kernel source file. However, the errors don't appear in the VS error panel. ??
Alternatively, if anyone's aware of an existing OpenCL compiler - it's annoying to have to run the host application just to compile the kernel - I'd appreciate a link.
I've managed to get this working by adding a post-build step to the project options. However, I'd really prefer for this exe to be run for every *.cl file in the project.
Update I had neglected to include an error code when formatting my error messages. Correcting them to match any of the formats listed here took care of that issue. Still trying to figure out how to associate an exe with a given file extension, though.
I have got an old project, C++, 64 bits compiled on VS2008. The project is built using some Python scripts (SCONS). I have got to compile it in VS2010.
All is working pretty fine except one small detail: in VS2008 all output goes to Debug\Win64 or Release\Win64, where scripts are looking for it, while in VS2010 it goes to Debug\x64 or Release\x64.
I know that there are PLATFORM/PLATFORMNAME macros being used by VS. Anything I did trying to change these values is mighty ignored by VS, or, if I am changing it manually in vcxproj files, VS refuses to compile at all.
For some company-related reasons scripts could not be changed. So for now I just added to a batch file that runs the script some xcopy commands to copy all the files from\x64 to \win64 before the script starts. It's kind of working, but I would like to know about a more elegant solution.
Thanks,
fLot
Another solution that might work is to create a file system junction so that \Win64 and \x64 becomes two different names to the same physical folder. You have to create a junction for each configuration instead of copying the files but once created it should stick between builds and ensure the two folders have the same content. See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_junction_point.