Deployed SFML Game not finding resources? - visual-studio-2010

I am using SFML 2.0 and Visual Studio 2010 professional to create a game. When I test my game from within Visual Studio, it works perfectly fine, loads up all the resources. It has no problem finding all of the resources. However, when I build my setup.exe file and install my game, the deployed version cannot find the resources.
I feel like this has to do with where it is looking for the resources within Visual Studio compared to when it is installed on the system. Within Visual Studio, the program accesses a "res" folder that is in the default directory with the project file. Shown here.
When I install the game, I package the "res" folder to be installed next to the .exe like-so.
However, when I run the deployed game, it cannot find any of the resources, and thus, crashes. I feel like this is a real simple fix, just a matter of me placing the "res" folder in a different location, but I have been messing with it for a while and cannot get this to work. Where do I place the "res" folder in the installer?

Given you have not provided any code, I'll assume you're loading your resources with relative paths. This means that your application will be looking for the files relative to the working directory. Now the working directory can be changed and Visual Studio does so and sets it to where the project file is located in (by default). When you now run your application by double clicking on it, the working directory is where you application itself is located. As such your setup should work.
However if you have a conjunction or you start the application from within your setup, you need to make sure the working directory is set correctly.
Additionally you could also change the working directory within your application, but this will require some platform specific code (or the use of for example Boost's Filesystem).

Related

How to turn visual studio files into actual app that can be sent/ downloaded and run by another user?

I have a finished project with a bunch of different winform files. They are linked between eachother through a menu file. How do I go from having this project as a visual studio application file to an actual application, with customized icon and that can be opened by a user from another PC (which doesn't have Visual studio). I don't want to just zip them.
I didn't try anything and this might be a newbie question but what I expect is basically to have an actual app instead of a bunch of files.
When you compile the winforms project you get a bin folder and a Debug/Release folders inside.
A simple way to deliver the app is just copy the Debug folder that have the .exe and dll files to the dest PC.
The best way is to follow this guide:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/deployment/quickstart-deploy-using-clickonce-folder?view=vs-2022
Or make an autoinstaller

Prevent Visual Studio from automagically changing the physical path of IIS virtual directory?

I have a Visual Studio "solution" which contains a Web application project (among a few other projects). Visual studio "typical" setup seems to be to insist that the output directory for binaries is smack in the root of the project source directory. In particular, each time the web application project is opened, Visual Studio will reset the physical path of the IIS virtual directory to point to the project directory.
This is problematic on many levels:
It's never wise to mix binary output directories and source trees
If the web application is buried deep within a directory hierarchy of other source, wherein many projects produce libraries which may be used as support libraries in the web application, then all the other supporting projects must have their binary output directories set to a bin directory a some non-obvious, nonsensical location somewhere in the source tree.
This "typical" VS setup does not have your web app setup duplicate the "production" setup you would get from a publish: there may be files in your source tree (an old .js file there there from a repository extraction, for example) that are not referenced in your projects, and so would not be in the production published package, but are there in your debugging setup.
It is very possible and very easy to configure all the projects in a Visual Studio solution to build to a bin directory in some subdirectory cleanly placed outside the source tree. It is also easy to ensure that the web app build places all content cleanly in this directory. It is also easy to configure an IIS virtual directory to point to this build output directory. And then Visual Studio, unannounced and unbidden, screws this up by arbitrarily changing the physical directory of the carefully configured virtual IIS app, to point to the middle of one's source tree.
How can this crazy-making behaviour be stopped? I.e. how do I prevent Visual Studio from automagically re-setting the physical path of the virtual web directory each time the web app project is opened?
This question has been asked many times here on Stack Overflow, but I have seen no real answers:
The response to this question (IIS8.5 is automatically changing Physical Path property) simply indicates how to control the order in which Visual Studio does its repointing.
This question and response (Visual Studio creating IIS virtual directories when solution opened) simply confirm the behaviour.
The response to this question (Opening projects changes iis settings) is simply wrong, as are some of the comments.
These questions (Visual Studio 2012 changes IIS application directory without asking), (Visual Studio changes local IIS configuration) have no responses.
Basically, no one has said it can't be done, but no one has give a decent solution either.
I have my application in IIS pointed at %SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot\web, and would like it to stay that way. Like others, I discovered that every time I opened the solution in Visual Studio (I'm using 2017), it would change the application's path in IIS to point to the path that Visual Studio uses.
I've made the following change to the project settings (web tab) for my project. In the servers section, I've set the drop-down to "External Host", and then entered the project URL as https://localhost/web. I'm now able to open the solution in VS without it updating the path in IIS.

Can I exclude/ignore files from Multi-Device Hybrid App build? (In order to prevent EBUSY error when building)

I'm getting this error when building my Multi-Device Hybrid App.
EXEC : error : EBUSY, resource busy or locked 'C:\path\to\project\bld\Debug\www\.svn\wc.db'
Suspected cause:
From what I can gather, when the Multi-Device Hybrid Apps Visual Studio extension builds the app it seems to grab all files in the project directory (except for some specific files/folders e.g. bld/bin directories and the .jsproj file) and add them to the package. That's ok, but not ideal, it really should only be grabbing the files in the VS project. The problem I'm experiencing is becuase it's grabbing my SVN .db file and adding it to the package, TortoiseSVN status cache then picks up this file and locks it - resulting in my error.
This is my specific issue, but I believe others could experience similar issues if they have any other files in the directory that they don't want included in the app bundle. I'd suggest it could be fixed by somehow setting excluded files/folders from the build or by the build script not grabbing everything, only those files included in the visual studio project. I'm not sure how to request that, so hopefully the developers will see this post...
So, my question is: Does anyone know of any way to tell the Multi-Device Hybrid Apps Visual Studio extension build process (or vs-mda\vs-cli) to ignore certain files or folders?
Or, does anyone have any suggestions as to how to make SVN and this VS extension play nice?
Unfortunately Visual Studio includes all the files under project directory except bin\bld folder. Currently only simple workaround would be to keep the files which you want to be excluded from package outside project directory. You can add the file to solution explorer by using Add --> Existing Item --> Add as link in case you want the file to appear in solution explorer but not included for build or packaging.
it seems folder with test as its name will be considered differently, and it will be excluded from package.

Opening a Visual Studio 2010 project in 2012 what creates the backup folder and how to control it?

I have an issue. We are upgrading to VS 2012 at work. When we open a VS 2010 project Visual Studio converts the project. This is fine, because VS 2010 can still use the project (yay microsoft). However, there is a \Backup folder created in the solution directory. Is this being created as part of the migration? Is there any way to control it?
The reason I ask is that the process that makes this folder copies web.config files into the folder. If you then try to build the solution (these are MVC projects), we get a "It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level. This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS." error. The cause is that there is a web.config file in a subfolder instead of the root folder. We did not make and do not want this change, and cannot figure out how to control it. Deleting the Backup\Web.config file fixes the error. Renaming it from web.config to web.config.bak fixes the problem.
I don't really want to have to personally open and convert every single project, and don't want random people bumping into this problem. Any idea how to either stop VS from creating the Backup folder, or how to make it create them in the my documents studio folder etc? I can't find any setting to control this and can't find any good info.
By chance, are you using the MvcBuildViews property to pre-compile your views at build time? If so, this is why you're encountering this (since it does the pre-compile in the same directory, it doesn't filter out any of the files below the project directory).
Note that you will also encounter this issue if you use the Publish feature for this project. Publish copies the web.config under your intermediate build output directory (by default, obj/) before and after applying web.config transforms.
The good news is that in VS2012, or in VS2010 with the latest Azure SDK installed, pre-compile is now supported for Web Application Projects (including MVC). These settings are currently in the project properties, under the Package/Publish Web tab.
(this doesn't directly address your question about the Backup folder, but it was too long for a comment.)
There is no way to control it that I found. We had to go ahead and run through and convert every project to 2012 and delete the backup folders to prevent any other team from running into it.

Visual Studio Gallery - MVC Project Template Failing to Upload

I've created a Visual Studio 2010 ASP.NET MVC Project Template as a VSIX package that I'd like to upload to the Visual Studio Gallery, but every time I try it tells me the path is too long...
Locally, it installs and works without issue...
The structure of the project (zipped as t.zip to try and reduce the length) is a standard MVC structured project, the only caveat is that it needs (well, doesn't need to but makes sense for it be there) installs to the Web sub-folder under the C# language, so the path inside the VSIX package is ProjectTemplate\CSharp\Web.
Is there a way around this limitation, or am I simply doing something wrong?
There is a check when you upload to the VS Gallery to see if the path length might end up being too long when installed on the users machine. This check includes not only the files directly in your VSIX, but also the files embedded inside the zip file. (This is because templates are unzipped on disk before they are used for instantiating a new project.)
Unfortunately, I think your only option is to shorten-up the paths of the files in the template itself.

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