Visual Studio
I experienced some problems this week when I tried to create an executable with Visual Studio 2008 for deployment. On Windows 7 test machines I would get this error:
"The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect."
I finally tracked the solution down to a Visual Studio project setting. In Project Settings > Configuration Properties > C/C++ > Code Generation there is a property called "Runtime Library". By default it is set to rely on external DLLs. Change these values to non-DLL settings (like MT or MTd) and they will include the runtime library in the executable. This makes for bigger executables, but they will run everywhere.
Having experienced this problem with Visual Studio 2010, I guessed this was the same issue. I uninstalled the Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package from my Windows XP machine, then created a simple test program on another Windows 7 machine. First I made sure I could create the problem, by using the default runtime library. Ever seen this error?:
I've seen this issue come up before on this forum. Now you know how to solve it and build Debug or Release executables that will run everywhere, with Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. Here is my test application from Visual Studio 2010, "testapp.MDd.bat" will only run if you have the 2010 Redistributable Package installed. "testapp.MTd.bat" will run everywhere:
Since we no longer have problems creating executables for Windows XP with Visual Studio 2010, I see no reason not to move our project on to a newer version. Visual Studio 2012 currently cannot make Windows XP executables, but Microsoft claims this will be supported soon. However, even if deployment to Windows XP is supported, Visual Studio 2012 itself will never run on Windows XP. Switching to Visual Studio 2012 would mean you cannot program Leadwerks with C++ on Windows XP.
What do you think? Should we make the move to 2012, 2010, or stick with 2008?
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