Hey I developed a small application and would like to compile it, however it comes with loads of extra stuff I dont want. All I want is a stand alone .exe file but instead I am getting pdb vshost.exe files etc. Is there anyway to get rid of these as I just want 1 .exe
Just copy/paste the exe file out. VS uses those files internally, and one is full of debugging symbols. Your going to want it if you plan on stepping into the code.
All these ''extra stuff'' is not required to run your ''small application''. You can verify that by copying the .exe file to a location where it will be standing alone indeed.
If it is not standing alone, as you say in the comment below: perhaps part of your code does compile to .dll, or you reference external dlls? Could you supply a list of filenames of files that are created?
Related
When I build solution in Visual Studio (2022), it generates an EXE (or DLL if I chose a class library) just as expected, except it also generates some files, like PDB, and some CS files. I know what most of them do, but if I am making a software, which consists of multiple of these files, I wouldn't want or like some people looking at the application directory and find source files and/or source code and solutions. This makes me come up with a question: Would deleting every single file except the compiled EXE or DLL impact their usability, or is there any other circumstance(s) to avoid creating these files, like SLN or PDB?
Thanks in advance :)
I have not tried anything, because, I simply don't know how to prevent VS from creating these files, except compiled files.
The .pdb files are outputs of your compilation. You can suppress them with:
<DebugSymbols>false</DebugSymbols>
The other files, like .cs and .sln are inputs to your project. Deleting them will mean you cannot build your program any more. I don't understand why you would want them to be deleted. If they're appearing in your output directory, check that you don't have "Copy local" (CopyToOutputDirectory) set on those items in your project.
For the last two years I have been using Java and NetBeans, where all I need to do to add a new third party library to my project is throw in the .jar file and NetBeans does the rest.
Recently I have switch to C++ and Visual Studio and I am having a really hard time getting a project to compile using OpenGL, GLUT and GLEW due to 'Missing reference' errors.
Some tutorials tell me I need to download the projects for GLUT/GLEW and run them (that didn't work), some tutorials tell me I need to add a .dll file to my Win32 folder, others say just put the header files in the same directory as your project and some say I need to install these libraries in to Visual Studio itself, not just to my project.
None of these approaches have worked thus far.
All I want is for this one project to use these libraries. This is throwing a major spanner in the works for me at the moment, any help would be appreciated.
Sorry, I don't have an easy answer for you. I've been using OpenGL on Windows for years, and it can be a pain.
MS doesn't even (really) support OpenGL, the headers that come with Windows are the old 1.x ones - and they have no plans on changing that (they want to you use DX).
So, I would start small.
First, get a basically empty Win32 console "Hello World" app running.
Then, just add one component, like Glut.
Then, do the same - keeping it compiling / linking - incrementally add other components.
Wherever they tell you to put headers, libraries, DLLs, etc, it needs to be reflected in your project file. So:
add the location of the header files to "C/C++->Additional Include Directories"
add the .lib files to the "Linker->Input->Additional Dependencies"
(it still won't find them so) add the location of the .lib files to "Linker->General->Additional Library Directories"
With all that in place it should compile and link, but may not run still because it can't find the DLLs (that go along with the .lib files).
The shortest path to getting running might just be to dump the DLLs in the Windows/System32 folder. But in the long run that can be problematic as other apps may overwrite it (or see you as overwriting theirs).
What I do with specific DLLs is just load them explicitly in my application so I know for sure what DLL I'm getting (I don't do much Windows-specific GL, but when I did, I had my own \OpenGL directory with the versions of .h files, libs and DLLs I wanted).
Good Luck!
Oh, LoadLibrary() will load a DLL, etc.
I need to include all the output from some of the programs projects in the installer... my question is similar to the one in this post: How to add a whole directory or project output to WiX package
However, I am afraid I don't really understand the answer given in this link. From all the reading I have done, I think I need to use Paraffin to do this. But is there a "start from the very beginning, how-to" resource for using paraffin?
I have read this page: http://www.wintellect.com/CS/blogs/jrobbins/archive/2008/12/22/paraffin-3-0-now-with-full-wix-3-0-support.aspx
and one of the posts mentions calling paraffin from a bat file. Is this how one would "use paraffin" in their installer? If it makes a difference, I have been using Visual Studio to work on this project, and am also not sure how to use command line from within Visual Studio. Does anyone have any resources for a very new beginner? Thanks.
I ended up including each .dll and .exe manually, since they don't change very often. It was fairly easy to format them in this style:
`<File Id="WhateverId" Name="NameToDisplayAfterInstall" Source="$(var.ProjectName.TargetDir)Filename.ext" />`
I used Excel to format a list of files quickly and easily. I put all of these File tags in the <DirectoryRef Id="INSTALLLOCATION">
tag.
I did figure out how to scrape all the dlls and exes from the project output by using Heat (not paraffin) and harvesting a directory, not a project. Harvesting a project yields only the main exe and dlls. The problem with harvesting a directory, at least in my case, is that I ended up with a lot of excess files, (like .pdb and .xml) that I didn't want.
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.
I have an executable (compiled by someone else) that is hitting an assertion near my code. I work on the code in Visual C++ 2003, but I don't have a project file for this particular executable (the code is used to build many different tools). Is it possible to launch the binary in Visual C++'s debugger and just tell it where the sources are? I've done this before in GDB, so I know it ought to be possible.
Without the PDB symbols for that application you're going to have a tough time making heads or tails of what is going on and where. I think any source code information is going to be only in that PDB file that was created when whoever built that application.
This is assuming that the PDB file was EVER created for this application - which is not the default configuration for release mode VC++ projects I think. Since you're asserting, I guessing this is a debug configuration?
Short of any other answers, I would try attaching to the executable process in Visual Studio, setting a break point in your code and when you step into the process you don't have source to, it should ask for a source file.
Yes, it's possible. Just set up an empty project and specify the desired .exe file as debug target. I don't remember exactly how, but I know it's doable, because I used to set winamp.exe as debug target when I developed plug-ins for Winamp.
Since you don't have the source file it will only show the assembly code, but that might still be useful as you can also inspect memory, registers, etc.
Update
If you are debugging an assertion in your own program you should be able to see the source just fine, since the path to the source file is stored in the executable when you compile it with debug information.