I hope this is no duplicate but I couldn't find any related topic. Every developer knows the problem. I create my app, deploy it and on some other machine it does not run because some dependency is missing. Often those dependecies are part of the workloads installed along with Visual Studio or some SDKs.
My question now is if there is a way to test my app on my dev machine like it had not installed SDKs and VS? Basically I want the app to only consider dependencies I explicitely specified through project references, nuget packages or locally copied files. Or in short: every dependency should be part of the app's deployment target folder.
Of course some really basic OS-dependent stuff needs to be used as well but I don't want the app to use stuff like OpenAL, GLFW, Windows SDK or similiar things just because I have installed it on my machine beforehand.
I hope you can understand what I mean. So I basically need some sandbox. I know there are things like VMs, docker, etc but I would like to use this as I run my app from Visual Studio. So if I hit F5 I want the app to ignore globally installed stuff at all.
I work with VS 2022. Thanks for advice.
You could use a continuous integration system in order to build (from scratch), publish and test on a fixed known build agent configuration. I used Teamcity.
You could use a Virtual Machine or a docker image as agent PC.
Moreover you can configure more agents with different possible configurations.
As a general rule of thumb, you can reference Nuget packages instead of assemblies in the GAC. This way, they will be copied to your application's bin folder.
You can also use .NET Application Publishing to create a deployable folder with your application. If you're targeting .NET Core, and the target machine may not have .NET Core installed or you don't know what version it will have, you can create a self contained release which will include the .NET Core binaries in the release.
See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/
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I have developed a C# winform app in VS 2012, but when I deploy it to another machine, it's exe file does not launch until and unless the machine has VS 2012 installed in it. Initially I thought there was a problem with deployment, but I have tried all methods, by simply transferring the bin folder to creating a setup project using installShield, I tried deploying a simple app which was successful without having to install VS 2012. Could someone please give me the reason behind this dependency of my app with VS 2012, and how to get rid of it? I cannot afford to install a VS 2012 on every machine that the software needs to deployed to. Thank you so much.
This is all about which .Net Framework is installed on the machine.
For Instance, VS2012 will run on .Net Framework 4.5, but the computer your trying to run this software on maybe running on an earlier version.
If any of the assemblies that your adding to your solution are built on a later version of the .Net framework then it will be incompatible on the users machine.
change Your project Debug mode to Release Mode Then Run The App then Go to >Bin > Release Folder then u can Find Exc Setup !! Have Fun with Code !!
Probably your app depends on some assembly that is installed along with VS. You can use Dependency Walker to find out exactly what. On second thought, since this is a .Net application your dependencies should be limited to .Net assemblies and the .Net framework - you could find out exactly what you're missing on the target machine with dotPeek.
I have created a simple inventory application in WPF. How should I give it to client now ?
One way what I did: I have set my AppPresentation solution as start up project and I can see all the DLLs from other solutions are added in the Debug and Release directory of this solution.
When I copy the Release folder to other drive (from D: to C:) and run the AppPresentation.exe some Error occurs about some DLL missing but I can still see those DLLs in this folder.
However when I copy the debug folder to the other drive and run the application i.e. AppPresentation.exe now I can run the application successfully with complete working.
Can I give this entire Debug folder to the client and expect that it runs perfectly on his machine ? I will ensure .NET 4.0 Framework is installed on that machine (but not Visual Studio ofcourse). Will this work ?
It will work as long as you have the required version of the .NET Framework installed on the client and all the necessary dll's have been included,
Ideally you should look at creating a Visual Studio setup project:
Using a setup project has the following advantages:
All your dll's and other files required for the application to run will be consolidated in one setup file
You can specify prerequsites such as .NET Framework which will prevent installation until all the required components have been installed first.
Users can specify exactly where on disk the application should be installed without manually copying the dlls (as would be the case in your scenario).
This is but a few advantages of using a setup project but hopefully you'll be convinced to give it a try as it is the preferred way of installing Windows applications
P.S If your setup project gets more complex consider looking at Wix
I have created a windows application and I have published it by publishing wizard.
Now I want to make it portable so that the end user does not need to install the application.
The application is very simple and the only dll it is referencing is office outlook interop.
Please let me know how can I make the application portable
You should be able to just copy the files in the bin folder and launch the app from there. This is called "XCOPY deployment", long marketed as one of the major benefits of .NET applications.
Just make sure that you set the properties on the Office reference so that the DLL is copied into the bin folder, too.
However, for this to work, the client machine must have the appropriate version of the .NET Framework installed. So it won't be truly portable unless you can control the configuration of all target machines, but at least it's a good start.
There's no need for the Winforms application to be installed. Just set Copy Local to true for your external referenced dlls. Build your project and copy all the files in /Bin/Release or /Bin/Debug (depending on project settings).
The only thing that has to be installed on the client's machine is the appropriate .Net Framework version.
We are building an application on .net, And it is an Image Viewer application uses .net 3.5.
And this application will be on a CD along with other images.
My Question is, is it possible to Auto Run this application when you insert a CD on a machine which DOESN'T Contain .NET Frame Work.
Or any other ways of building the application which runs from the CD.
Autorun is a feature of Windows. It does not have anything to do with .NET really. You can use it by placing apropriate files in the root of your CD.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoRun
In order to execute a .NET app WITHOUT .NET framework installed, point the Autorun.inf to an installer of you application, which would be deployed on the CD as well.
The application will fail to run directly when it cannot find the libraries it need.
What you can do is to create a non-.NET dependent bootstrapper, include the framework installer.
So when the CD auto run, run the bootstrapper, the bootstrapper will run the installer. Once installed, run the application.
No, you can't run .NET applications on a computer without the .NET Framework installed. That's a hard rule, and a pretty intuitive one, it seems to me. Somehow, this question still gets asked a lot.
But Auto Run has nothing to do with the .NET Framework. It's a feature provided by the Windows operating system designed to run your setup/installation program directly from the inserted installation medium without requiring any kind of user interaction.
So what you should be doing is creating a setup program for your .NET application. You can do this from within Visual Studio: just create a Setup Project instead of a Windows Forms Application. The setup program will take care of detecting whether or not the computer has the appropriate version of the .NET Framework installed, and installing it if necessary along with the application. The setup bootstrapper will be able to run without the .NET Framework installed, so you can create an autorun.inf file that simply specifies setup.exe as the application to be launched automatically.
I've used mono to do this a few times, not with the static linking as mentioned in the other answer, but by including the mono distribution on the cd (or a subset of it). Mono doesn't seem to do much in the way of modifying registry, system32, etc. So you can do an xcopy deployment of if, or CD deployment in this case. You'll end up running mono.exe
I think Mono supports some form of static linking that doesn't require installation. But I never tried it myself.
I am developing an SDK for internal use at our company. It will not be deployed (in SDK form, it will deploy as a runtime included with our products) outside of the company. Other development groups will use this SDK to develop products and will get the SDK via setup (they will not pull source or binaries from source control). As part of the setup, the SDK assemblies will be put on the target machine and they will also be installed in the GAC. When a product is deployed, the SDK's "runtime" msm will be used to install the SDK's assemblies in the GAC.
So, each developer will install the SDK on their machine. When they want to add a reference, they will browse to the install location of the SDK (or get it via the .NET tab on the Add References dialog if we decide to register the assemblies). When they run the product they are developing, the assemblies will be resolved from the GAC.
That all seems pretty reasonable.
My question is about the best way for me, as the SDK developer, to work. I will primarily be working on the SDK. So, in addition to writing code for the SDK, I will be writing test code, test applications, samples, etc. Is it better to write the tests against the "installed" SDK (i.e. reference the assemblies from their "installed" location, make sure that the assemblies are installed in the GAC so that when the tests (etc) run they are resolving from the GAC just like they will in real life?) If I work this way, then as I work on the SDK, if I make a change, I will need to make sure that the modified assembly is in the GAC.
In addition to working on the SDK, I may also contribute to actual product features which might, in turn, utilize functionality in the SDK. Again, it seems that I should do my work against the "installed" SDK so that I am using the same version as everyone else.
Maybe I am overcomplicating this, but I feel a little confused over the whole issue of managing the work being done (by me) locally on the SDK, running/testing against the "as deployed" assemblies (GAC), and how/if to transition between the two. Part of my problem is that I have a good amount of experience in application development working on "big" projects where I have not had to deal with these kinds of issues (deployment, build process, etc). That is, I have always been a consumer of any internally developed SDKs, not a producer (or producer/consumer). I have also only recently transitioned from C++/COM/VB6 to .NET development. For what it's worth, I will be developing primarily in C# and will be developing (or contributing to) class libaries and WCF services.
I did find this link from here at SO about testing issues when working with GAC deployed assemblies:
Testing code in GAC deployed assemblies
But I'm not sure that it helped me that much.
Anyway, thanks for any tips or ideas that anyone is able to share.
You're overcomplicating matters. There is no functional difference between loading assemblies from the local app bin directory vs loading from the GAC. For unit testing, go with the simplest and fastest solution: just run the tests referencing the SDK assemblies that were copied into the test app's local bin directory by the build process.
You should have a different testing step that exercises loading an application that references your SDKs that reside in the GAC to make sure you don't have any signature issues, but this is more of a system-wide integration test that should be run before release and after any install configuration changes. Since the chances of screwing up your GAC installation are relatively small, it doesn't need to be monitored all the time, IMO.
The less install prerequisites you place on the dev environment, the less time it will take for each dev to get set up on a new machine. Keeping a clean and simple dev environment is good for general dev sanity, but it's particularly important when you have multiple devs who each work with multiple VMs for development and testing.