The problem is that you’ll never know if they failed or not. How many people just give up and say Xojo is crap because it doesn’t even run?
Even if you’re correct that Xojo itself isn’t seeing it there is something obviously different in our installers than yours. I would be curious to get installer information along with code. I’m using the InnoSetup code that Paul shared a while back.
It fails so much in my InnoSetup installer that my client requested that I just put the files in the directory. So if you are using that code then I have to call BS. It just doesn’t work and there are others on this thread having the same issue.
Since there IS a choice for how YOU want to ship your products (and they have important consequences) YOU need to decide which way you want to ship your product.
If you want dll’s next to the exe* they are all there you can use a copy step to put them next to the exe.
Or you can use the redistributable installer.
Its your choice.
BUT if you put the DLL’s next to the exe
yes the set up looks “ugly” - thats Windows and how it looks for dll’s. Check out an install of Office.
these dlls will NEVER get system updates if MS discovers an issue or vulnerability
DLLs installed via the redist installer
are not next to the exe so no “ugly” looking folder
WILL get system updates and security updates from MS
Is it plausible to make it so compiling copies the dll’s next to the exe for you ? Sure. Someone could file a feature request for that.
But it has the implications I mentioned above.
The “best” way to solve the error from everything I’ve seen SEEMS to be
if you have a partial install uninstall it
DO WINDOWS UPDATE and install ALL important updates (you may need to restart your machine)
repeat step 2 until there are no more important updates
install the redist or whatever uses the redist
*We REALLY REALLY tried to make the “next to the exe” NOT be a requirement but it has to be this way since the system loader is involved and it has a limited number of places it will look. Its honestly NOT us. The ones we DO have flexibility over because we load them manually are plugins & they are tucked away. And no we cant do that with the C++ ones since they are needed WHEN the app starts and the system loads them at that time. They’re literally part of being able to make the app launch at all.
We have the same number of successful install-to-downloads ratio as we’ve had on Windows previously. It isn’t a case of fewer number of people being able to install after downloading. The same InnoSetup code we give as an example in our Windows Runtime read me is what we use ourselves. The Xojo IDE itself must use the redist- as a multi-tiered compiler/linker with LLVM and other pieces it has particular dependencies that our user’s apps don’t have.
We include (and use) the latest version of the redist with each version of Xojo we ship. If someone has had issues with the redist back in 2016r1, they may want to try the one included in the current version of Xojo- Microsoft does try and fix bugs in the redist that are reported to them. But if there is some other difference I would say it may be that our developer-users (everyone here!) themselves may be more likely to be running Windows 10 and/or be more up to date than a random end-user.
With all that said- if you want to bypass the whole redist thing, add a Copy Files build step once and have the runtime automatically present with your built app going forward.
We try very hard to do the “right” thing- what OS vendors ask us to do and what is supported by them up top. But at the same time we do listen to our users, and everyone at Xojo is certainly aware of what’s being said here…
I had to click on the Like button a lot … But not in favour of Xojo
Whatever reason Xojo Inc is giving us why this decision was made, it is a mess and the reason why I use an older Xojo version to avoid this mess.
As Michel pointed out … I do not want to angry my customers.
It is a mess, but I think it’s mainly an MS created mess. What the answer is I don’t know, but I do know that on the installs I had trouble with, it wasn’t trouble with Xojo directly, it was trouble even getting the MS redistributable installed at all. Purely an MS problem.
I wish it wasn’t necessary, but I don’t have any good suggestions to solve the problem. I am just glad the local dll fix is available. I wouldn’t have been able to run my internal company tool at all if that were not available as an option. Probably would have had to spend almost all day reinstalling a windows machine.
Personally I am going to be pushing hard to get all Windows only software switched out for something else so we can run linux on our Windows machines. I don’t want to waste my time on Windows any more than I have to, and I don’t feel like it’s getting better. Win 7 used to be pretty reliable but lately since 10 came out it’s challenging to just keep windows 7 windows 7.