I have been pulling out what's left of my hair trying to install software that requires a C++ redistributable (2017 x86) using InstallShield lite.
To start with, I define a prerequisite To include the C++ redistributable. When a user attempts an install, the user interface always appears. Now this is not a real problem however, if the redistributable was already installed`or there is a newer version then it will fail with a message that it has failed and it wioll ask the user if he wants to continue or abort the installation. If he selects continue, the software installs fine. This is not very user friendly.
This happens despite the correct command line switches being used i.e. /q /norestart. If you do this at a command prompt manually, it operates as it should. In other words it installs it, or fails because it is already installed but tells the user nothing. This is the way it is supposed to work.
Now I tried doing this as a custom action at the end of the installshield script but then the install appears to hang on some machines and on others other errors.
Now the only clue that I can give, is that if I create an MSI installation, then it never prompts. However with a setup.exe install it acts as above. I have only been successful with the msi install if I am installing a 64 bit app. Never with a 32 bit app.
Can someone guide me as to what I am doing incorrectly?
Thanks
VCRedist: This C / C++ runtime (in various versions and flavors) is a pain indeed. I decided to write something up a while back to try to summarize a few things:
Wix per user installer to detect the Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable (please skim at least - not great, better than nothing I hope - deals mostly with detecting the presence of the runtime).
Merge Modules: Does Installshield Lite support merge modules? If so, you can install the VCRedist using merge modules instead of the VCRedist_x64.exe file. This is insufficient for UWP applications (the universal CRT) as explained in these links:
Redistributables for deploying C++ exe developed with Visual Studio 2015 on Windows 7
WIX merge c++ runtime
Do read the links directly above - they are quick reads.
Batch File: Another option would be to keep the VCRedist_x64.exe file separate from your main setup and to zip up your MSI and the VCRedist_x64.exe in a ZIP archive and put an Install.cmd batch file in there which will install the VCRedist first and then your MSI file? Not too neat - one would have to admit. I think you can make a self-extracting archive that would automagically invoke it, but I haven't done that in ages.
Just a mock-up batch file from link below (untested):
REM 1. Install VCRuntime
vc_redist.x64.exe /install /quiet /log "%temp%\Install_vc_redist_2017_x64.log"
REM 2. Install MSI
msiexec.exe /i MySetup.msi /L*v C:\MySetup.log /QN
Not sure about security fixes and that kind of stuff. Run Windows Update afterwards?
Security Fixes & Link to Download: There have been so many security fixes for this runtime, and it is usually installed on most machines, that I would frankly just link to the download of the latest version and have people install it themselves as a pre-requisite rather than bundling an obsolete version in my setup, but that isn't really sufficient unless your package is for corporate use only (in which case they prefer to install their own runtimes with full control).
Some Links (to find easily):
Command lines to install and uninstall silently the VC++ 2017 Redistribuables (installation command lines, untested by me)
The latest supported Visual C++ downloads (please check)
Microsoft Visual C++ 2017 Resitributable Package (x86) (please do read this)
How to prevent vc_redist.x##.exe (VS2017) from ambiguously failing due to pending reboot?
Visual Studio 2017 Installer Project - include VC++ 2015 Redistributable
There is always the WiX toolkit
Distributable Code for Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 (Includes Utilities, Extensibility, and BuildServer Files)
Mailbag: How to perform a silent install of the Visual C++ 2010 redistributable packages
Thanks for a comprehensive answer. I am sure it will help a lot of people. What I have found is that running vc_redist.x86 from the command line in quiet mode will indeed always work as it should. In other words, if it is not installed, it will be installed. If it is already installed or a later release is installed, it will just return with no complaints. That is not the case using InstallShield Lite 2018 (same for all previous releases).
However, there is a simple solution to get it to work as I found out. All one needs to do is to include the entry Hidden="1" in the behavior part of the PRQ file. So there will now be an entry that looks like this:
<behavior Hidden="1" Failure="4" Reboot="2"/>
This solves the issue. It no longer runs separately from the installshield installer with it's own GUI but rather the messages now appear in the menus in installshield and it operates exactly as if you ran it at the command line. No more errors.
I am facing the following (fairly common) problem: I am running my program in Debug mode in VS2010 and/or VS2012, but at startup it crashes, saying:
The programme can't start because MSVCP100D.dll is missing from your
computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.
Now I found a number of possible solutions, but none of them work for me:
Compile with /MTd instead of /MDd: actually this does solve the problem, but I am not allowed to: my program is part of a bigger program, and /MD[d] is mandatory.
Install the VS 2010 Redistributable package: This doesn't work because I have VS 2012 installed, so this installer tells me: "A newer version of Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable has been detected on the machine."
Finding, dragging and dropping a version of MSVCP100D.dll into the correct directory: I am not dropping unknown DLLs into places where they might interfere with other things.
Last resort: reinstalling VS2010/VS2012: possible, but as it would also mean reinstalling lots of other packages and plugins I need, I'd like to avoid this if it's not absolutely necessary.
Are there any other options left?
The Visual Studio REDIST packages never deploy the DEBUG versions of the CRT files. This is by design.
With VS 2012 or later, the easiest way to deploy the DEUBG versions of the CRT is to install the "Remote Debugging Tools" package on your test machines.
For VS 2012, the latest Remote Debugging Tools package is here
For VS 2013, the latest Remote Debugging Tools package is here.
Another option is to just use application local deployment of the DLL (i.e. copy it into your app directory). Again this is only for testing purposes. For actual deployment of your application, you are required to use the non-debug versions of the CRT.
If this error is happening on your development machine, however, then you have other problems because with VS 2012 installed, you should have the VS 2012 DEBUG CRT on that machine.
UPDATE:: Sorry, I would have expected the debug CRT DLLs to be included in the remote debugging tools package along with the remote debugger bits and the Direct3D 11 Debug Device. Alas, it's not. See Preparing a Test Machine To Run a Debug Executable. You have to either use the MSMs in Program Files (x86) directory in \Common Files\Merge Modules or copy the DLL-side-by-side from Program Files (x86) directory in \Microsoft Visual Studio <version>\VC\redist\Debug_NonRedist\. The VS Team probably assumed you would have already been doing that, but I'll suggest to them to roll it into the remote tools package.
I had a similar issue (the project made in VS 2012 but I was running VS2013) and resolved it by:
Open the project (or the solution ) in VS2013(or the newer one)
Open Project menu and select "Retarget the project" option (it was the first option but after applying it, this option vanished).
Rebuild your solution.
I am new to openCV and C++ and had the same problem using openCV 2.4.10 with Visual Studio Express 2013 on a Windows 7, 32-bit platform. If I made a simple program without using OpenCV, the program ran but when I used OpenCV I got the missing DLL error.
This post made things clear:
I guess the problem I had was not with my Visual Studio but my OpenCV. The OpenCV was compiled on a version of visual studio which required MSVCP110.dll. I could have tried another version of OpenCV or compiled OpenCV again using VS2013 but I was short of time. Instead, I found the dll file elsewhere and placed it in my system32 folder (not sure if that's recommended). This fixed the problem. However as #slater mentioned, I won't recommend downloading the dll from external website due to security issues.
This is a debug runtime DLL. If (and ONLY if!) you just want to run the debug build of your own application on a system without Visual Studio installed, then you can find the missing DLLs in
C:\Windows\System32 (for 64-bit builds)
C:\Windows\SysWOW64 (for 32-bit builds)
Just keep copying DLLs until your executable will run.
If this is NOT what you are trying to do, refer to https://stackoverflow.com/a/27386721/2279059, which is the CORRECT, but less practical answer.
I had the same problem, I found out that the cause is that I used dll compiled with VS2012 in a VS2013 project. JUST downloaded the missing dll and put it in my linker path and wala: the program worked. I downloaded it from http://www.dll-files.com/.
Particulars: My program was working in in release mode but not in the debug mode as it says the MSVCP110D.dll is missing. My code was an opencv image processing program. I put the missing dll in opencv linker path in the VS2013 project options.
I have a problem with our executable. I'm running this C++ 32-bit executable on my Windows 7 64-bit development box that also has all those Microsoft applications (Visual Studio 2008 + 2010, TFS, SDK, Microsoft Office)...
And it's still running just fine.
Now I got the client installation of the very same program and was asked to test it with a clean Windows 7 installation. Thus I got one Windows 7 64-bit VMware and updated it to Windows 7 SP 1 (the very same version my developer box is tuning).
But while on my developer box everything is fine the program does not work with the VMware (30 days trial) box.
The x86 Dependency Walker is telling me that the following DLL files are missing:
API-MS-WIN-CORE-COM-L1-1-0.DLL
API-MS-WIN-CORE-WINRT-ERROR-L1-1-0.DLL
API-MS-WIN-CORE-WINRT-L1-1-0.DLL
API-MS-WIN-CORE-WINRT-ROBUFFER-L1-1-0.DLL
API-MS-WIN-CORE-WINRT-STRING-L1-1-0.DLL
API-MS-WIN-SHCORE-SCALING-L1-1-0.DLL
DCOMP.DLL
GPSVC.DLL
IESHIMS.DLL
I googled for those API-MS-WIN-... DLL files and found they should actually already be part of Windows 7 (some sites claiming the belong to Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 though).
I already tried the suggested fixes I found, which are:
running 'sfc /scannow'
installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 runtime executables
But that didn't solve anything. :-(
Side note: My development box does not have them either, and does not seem to need them. For example, the user32.dll on my box does not link against one of those, while the installation on the VMware does.
Any idea on how to fix this issue?
I tried to find a suitable download / fix on the Microsoft pages, but I failed.
After solving my issue I wanted to report what I found out, and I can't post this as an answer because the question has been closed.
Actually all the DLL files reported missing by the Dependency Walker tool, namely those
* API-MS-WIN-CORE-...
type DLL files were not part of the actual problem.
In my case the registration of three OCX files was missing and after that everything was just fine, BUT Dependency Walker tool still listed all the very same DLL files as before even when the program was just running fine now.
The gist of it: As someone elsewhere stated, the tool is a bit dated by now and does not always work properly with a newer OS. Thus keep an eye open and don't get mislead by missing 'API-MS-WIN-CORE-COM-L1-1-0.DLL', ... the problem probably lies entirely elsewhere.
This problem is related to missing the Visual Studio "redistributable package." It is not obvious which one is missing based on the dependency walk, but I would try the one that corresponds with your compiler version first and see if things run properly:
Visual Studio 2015
Visual Studio 2013
Visual Studio 2010
Visual Studio 2008
I ran into this problem because I am using the Visual Studio compilers, but not the full Visual Studio environment.
Going to dare to inject a new link here: The latest supported Visual C++ downloads. Stein Åsmul, 29.11.2018.
I just resolved the same problem with C++ Qt 5 and Windows 7 64 bits with MSCVC 2012.
In the beginning I thought it was a MSVC/Windows DLL file problem, but as BorisP said, the problem was in my project dependencies. The key is "How to know your project dependencies in Qt 5?".
As I didn't find any clear way to know it (Dependency Walker didn't help me a lot...), I followed next the "inverse procedure" that takes no more than 5 minutes and avoid a lot of headaches with DLL file dependencies:
Compile your project and take the executable file to an empty folder: myproject.exe
Try to execute it, It will retrieve an error (missing DLL files...).
Now, copy all the DLL files from Qt (in my case they were in C:\Qt\Qt5.1.1\5.1.1\msvc2012_64_opengl\bin) to this folder.
Try to execute again, it will probably works fine.
Start to delete progressively and try every time your executable still works, trying to leave the minimum necessary DLL files.
When you have all the DLL files in the same folder it is easier to find which of them are not valid (XML, WebKit, ... whatever..), and consequently this method doesn't take more than five minutes.
I just resolved the same problem.
Dependency Walker is misleading in this case and caused me to lose time. So, the list of "missing" DLL files from the first post is not helpful, and you can probably ignore it.
The solution is to find which references your project is calling and check if they are really installed on the server.
#Ben Brammer, it is not important which three .ocx files are missing, because they are missing only for Leo T Abraham's project. Your project probably calls other DLL files.
In my case, it was not three .ocx files, but missing MySQL connector DLL file. After installing of MySQL Connector for .NET on server, the problem disappeared.
So, in short, the solution is: check if all your project references are there.
As mentioned, DCOMP is part of the VC++ redistributables (implementing the OpenMP runtime) and is the only truly missing component. All the rest are false reports.
Specifically API-MS-WIN-XXXX.DLL are API-sets - essentially, an extra level of call indirection introduced gradually since Windows 7. Dependency Walker development seemingly halted long before that, and it can't handle API sets properly.
So there is nothing to worry about there. You're not missing anything more.
A better alternative to find the truly needed DLL files that are missing (if that is indeed the problem) is to run Process Monitor and step backwards from the failure, searching for sequences of failed probes for a specific DLL file in all the system path.
I also ran into this problem, but the solution that seems to be a common thread here, and I saw elsewhere on the web, is "[re]install the redistributable package". However, for me that does not work, as the problem arose when running the installer for our product (which installs the redistributable package) to test our shiny new Visual Studio 2015 builds.
The issue came up because the DLL files listed are not located in the Visual Studio install path (for example, C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\redist) and thus had not been added to the install. These api-ms-win-* dlls get installed to a Windows 10 SDK install path as part of the Visual Studio 2015 install (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Redist).
Installing on Windows 10 worked fine, but installing on Windows 7 required adding these DLL files to our product install. For more information, see Update for Universal C Runtime in Windows which describes the addition of these dependencies caused by Visual Studio 2015 and provides downloads for various Windows platforms; also see Introducing the Universal CRT which describes the redesign of the CRT libraries. Of particular interest is item 6 under the section titled Distributing Software that uses the Universal CRT:
Updated September 11, 2015: App-local deployment of the Universal CRT is supported. To obtain the binaries for app-local deployment, install the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 10. The binaries will be installed to C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Redist\ucrt. You will need to copy all of the DLLs with your app (note that the set of DLL files are necessary is different on different versions of Windows, so you must include all of the DLL files in order for your program to run on all supported versions of Windows).
This contribution does not really answer the initial question, but taking into account the hit-rate of this thread I assume that there are quite a few people dealing with the problem that API-MS-WIN-CORE- libraries cannot be found.
I was able to solve a problem where my application refused to start with the error message that API-MS-WIN-CORE-WINRT-STRING-L1-1-0.DLL is not found by simply updating Visual Studio.
I don't think that my build environment (Windows 7 Pro SP1, Visual Studio Ultimate 2012) was messed up completely, it worked fine for most of my projects. But under some very specific circumstances I got the error message (see below).
After updating Visual Studio 11 from the initial CD-Version (I forgot to look up the version number) to version 11.0.61030.00 Update 4 also the broken project was running again.
This solved the issue for me:
Uninstall the Visual Studio 2010 redistributable package if you have it installed already, and then install Microsoft Windows 7 SDK.
I solved the problem. When I registered the OCX files, I ran it with the Command Window that had been executed as an administrator.
For anybody who came here, but with a Photoshop problem: my solution was to uninstall the MS VC++ redistributable first x86 and 64 both. Then install one appropriate to the Windows version and architecture (86 or 64).
Installation of SQL Server Management Studio 2014 on a freshly installed Windows 7 resolved this problem at our client after a two-day ridiculous battle.
I came here with this problem occurring, after trying a fresh Windows 7 OEM install, upgrading to Windows 10.
After some searching of Microsoft forums and such I found the following solution which worked for me:
Replace C:\Windows10Upgrade\wimgapi.dll with the one from C:\Windows\System32\wimgapi.dll
I suggest also checking how much memory is currently being used.
It turns out that the inability to find these DLL files was the first symptom exhibited when trying to run a program (either run or debug) in Visual Studio.
After over a half hour with much head scratching, searching the web, running Process Monitor, and Task Manager, and depends, a completely different program that had been running since the beginning of time reported that "memory is low; try stopping some programs" or some such. After killing Firefox, Thunderbird, Process Monitor, and depends, everything worked again.
I had the same problem. After spending hours searching on the web, I found a solution for me.
I copied the file combase.dll file (C:\Windows\System32) to the release folder, and it resolved the problem.
Just to confirm answers here, my resolution was to copy the DLL that was not loading AND the ocx file that accompanied it to the system32 folder, that resolved my issue.
I'm about to begin a project for building a plugin to a large simulation system built with MSVC6, and offering instructions for compiling DLL's using MSVC6.
I have MSVC10 and 2012 available, and I'm wondering if it's even possible to configure these to build "down" to MSVC6 compatibility. Seems last time I dug into this, the answer was a resounding "No". Do I have to find an old MSVC6 install?
Update: There's also a 64-bit Visual Studio 2008 version of this that I could develop against, so same question: Can I configure a "new" visual studio (like 2012 or so) to compile down to VC6 or 2008 compatibility?
You can take an alternative approach, if you create your new project as a COM dll you can interact with it from MSVC6 however you will need to deliver any new linked runtime dlls as well in your resulting setup.
I'm using the Visual Studio Setup project. If I go to the properties of the Setup project, it lets me choose which pre-reqs are required, at which point I choose the C++ Redistributable.
On some systems, this works fine - but recently my users are reporting that the install failed because "A newer version of Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable has been detected on the machine."
What's the proper way to do this? Is Visual Studio's detection fouled up somehow and unable to detect C++?
Yuck, this is ugly. I was wondering what would happen after Microsoft gave up on the side-by-side install of the runtime DLLs for VS2010. Seems clear, the interwebs are full of this installer error. The biggest victim seems to be Microsoft itself with Streets and Maps failing to install.
I'm not aware of any security patches for it so I have to guess that you haven't updated to SP1 yet. And your customers use a product of a vendor that did. This is a battle that you're always going to lose some day. Do consider taking advantage of the app-local deployment for the DLLs, copying them in the same directory as your main EXE. Simply copy them from the vc/redist directory before putting the setup package together, no need to tick the prerequisite. You'll need:
msvcr100.dll and msvcp100.dll for the regular CRT
atl100.dll if you use ATL
mfc100.dll, mfc100u.dll, mfcm100.dll, mfc100u.dll if you use MFC (u = Unicode, m = managed)
mfc100xxx.dll where xxx is the 3 letter language code if you use MFC on a non-English machine
vcomp100.dll if you use OpenMP in your code.
Only disadvantage is that they won't get updated if there's a security patch. That could be an advantage too, depending on what color glasses you wear. If you're uncomfortable about it then keeping the machine that creates the setup package updated, including enabling Windows Update, is an important requirement.
The default Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable uses a Product Code for detection. So Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Redistributable is not detected as installed. This is why the package tries to install it and fails.
A good solution is to create your own custom prerequisite which uses a better detection criteria. Here is an article which may help you:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2010/05/05/10008146.aspx
Visual Studio setup projects do not support custom prerequisite creation. However, it can be done by manually generating the required manifests.
You can find the manifests structure here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229223(VS.80).aspx
These manifests can be generated automatically with the Bootstrapper Manifest Generator tool.
After generating the package manifests, you can add all these files (including the package) in a separate folder in the Visual Studio prerequisites folder, for example:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages\
This way Visual Studio will show the prerequisite in your setup project properties page.