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.
Related
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/
I created my first simple C# app in VS 2010. Nothing but an application that runs a form and uses several references. I want to put this on other machines. What is needed to run this application besides the exe. I am targeting .NET 4.0 and I know 4.0 is installed on the machines. I tried to put it on a machine but all it does is nothing. Is there some kind of runtime I need to install besides the .NET framework. What is required to run this Winform app. Thanks
If you dump the bin\Release folder on another computer, you should be able to run it by running <myApp>.exe as long as the computer has the target .NET framework installed.
I have Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 installed in my computer. I wrote a program using C# & it created a .exe file in the Debug directory. When I double click on the .exe file, I can open it on my machine. But if I copy that .exe file and try to run it on another computer, (that doesn't have Microsoft Visual Studio) it doesn't work. Can you please tell me how can I make a .exe file work on any computer? Or if you know a website that explains it. I have done this using Winzip long time ago and including all the library files alone with the .ext file. but don't remember how I did that anymore. Does any one knows how can I include all my library files alone with the .exe file. so I can run it on a computers that doesn't have those library files?
Programs compiled with VS2010 can be targeted against a variety of .NET Frameworks. However, the many versions of Windows don't always have the most recent .NET versions installed.
Check which version of the .NET Framework your program is using by looking under the Application tab of your project properties. You should see a Target Framework drop down list, which will tell you what version of the framework other computers will need to have installed in order to run your program.
You have a few options to get your program working on other computers.
Compile the program with a different, lower framework. (e.g. .NET 2 is often available on Windows XP, while .NET 4 is uncommon on this OS.) This will only work if you aren't using any features from later versions of .NET.
Install the .NET framework you require on the client machine. Microsoft provides frameworks to download and install from http://www.microsoft.com/net/download
Try creating a Windows Installer using the Setup Project template. Add a new project to your solution from the Setup and Deployment category. After setting up this project, you should have an installer to run on other machines.
You will have to have the appropriate version of the .NET Framework installed on the computer you want to run your application on.
This are the things that you need to do.
Check if what OS version of your computer. If it's Windows XP check if it has .net framework 3.5 or to 4.0.You can download it here Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
Try to do Set up and deployment.
Step-by-Step Process of Creating a Setup and Deployment Project
Best Regards
I developed a winform application using C# in visual studio 2008. Now i want to run the exe on another PC which doesn't have .net framework or Visual Studio. I am sending the application using Zip via email. The second PC downloads that application and extracts into a normal folder and then it executes the exe file.
But i am getting the exception that .net frame work v 2.0 must be installed.
Can you please tell me how to run that exe without .net frame work installed?
(Amended for #Merhdad's sanity :-))
The short answer: You can. You shouldn't.
The long answer: You could technically create your own unmanaged bootstrapper that goes and download the .NET client profile redist and silently installs it using the MSI APIs, and then loads the CLR and hosts it in the process in order to execute the managed code, after which it silently uninstalls the .NET Framework from the machine.
The Disclaimer: I know few people that could pull that off. They would be the first to tell you not to do it.
The alternative hack answer: You can also use one of the tools #Mehrdad mentioned. i can't comment whether they work or not. However, you should be aware that this leaves your app linked to a specific snapshot of the .Net framework code, and for every security update you need to take, yuo have to relink and release an update of your application as well.
The alternative open source answer: You could ensure your WinForms app builds and runs on Mono, and deploy Mono side-by-side with the app. I've heard it supports that scenario.
The alternative IT answer: You could create a VM appliance with stripped down Window image that has .Net and your app only, and ship it as a single executable.
The right answer: Create an installer for your app that installs the .NET Framework for your customers.
Yes! You can do this with a variety of programs, and Spoon seems to be among the most up-to-date ones.
(Of course, this doesn't mean that you should, just that you can.)
This cannot be done. You must have the .NET Framework in order to run the application.
I solved the problem.I added a package in visual studio.I added Setup and deployment as a new project to my solution.later i added exe to that package.so if client machine runs the setup it'l create exe and can run the application successfully.
yeah,you can do that by converting your whole application to an installer.just check it out, it will helps u a lot
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCnfGUT-K-4
I want to make an advanced installer for my C# application. |I want my application continue its installation after the pre-requisites been installed.
My scenario is:
myApplication requires .net Framework 2
it redirects the user to the Microsoft website.
the user installs the framework.
the installation requires to restart the PC.
STOPPED INSTALLATION
After this step (after restarting) I want myApplication to continue the installation (go to the last stage of the installation)
Any suggestion on how I do this ?!?!
I would suggest taking a look at the nullsoft install system. Use the Modern UI theme and the DotNET macro (http://nsis.sourceforge.net/DotNET). That's everything that you are looking for prebuilt, for free, and you can be up and running with very little effort.
I've had experience releasing applications with this route and it works very well.
Things like InstallShield, or one of the other installer creation tools would be able to handle the pre-requisite side of things for you. If you want to roll your own, then you could check for the framework, perform the various steps you mentioned to install it, then add you setup application to the RunOnce registry key so it starts again on startup.
Looking at something that would handle all the pre-requisites etc for you would be my choice though :-)
Install in this order:
Install the .NET framework
Install your app.
Restart if needed.
You can create an installation project in VS2005/8 to handle installing your app and any needed dependencies.
Are you aware that your compiled c# app itself will do this? The bootstrapper compiled into a .Net exe will contain a redirect to get the framework with a working link to the microsoft website.