DLL Hell

[Mister_Rose]

I had written a program a while back to excercise our hardware and prove that the firmware was buggy. A few months later (now), I am being asked to deliver it to our partners.

So I went to create an installer that installs the run time and serial drivers. All the program does is communicate through the serial port to the device. The build is fine, but when I go to run the setup file I get 3 errors that all say...

Product "blah" depends on product with upgrade code {B5171839-26E3-48D9-9FD6-AF7F39055146}, version {8.2.379.0}, language in {} which is not in the distribution.

"blah" is "NI Remote Provider for MAX", "NI Labview Real-Time Error Dialog", and "NI LVBrokerAux 8.2.1"

As I said, I'm just talking to the serial port and I get these other DLL errors at run time, when the setup runs.

How do I correct the distribution, when I do not even see these items in the list of checkboxes in the project properties box?

[smercurio_fc]

Were you using VISA to communicate via the serial port? If so, at a minimum you need to include "NI-VISA" in your installer. Did you include this?

[Mister_Rose]

I did not include VISA, but I did have the NI-Serial in there. I thought that by including that, it would drag in what it needed.

Does the project manager even look at the application to see what modules need to be included? Or does it rely on the programmer to figure that out?

[smercurio_fc]

Installers aren't that smart. If only they were.

Do you have one of the NI serial hardware products? That's the only reason why you would need NI-Serial. If you're using the computer's serial port it's not necessary, and is superfluous. As I indicated, if you're using VISA, then you need to install NI-VISA. Are you actually using VISA in your code. You never said if you were or not.

[Mister_Rose]

I don't expect the installer to be that smart. I do expect the project manager to be smart enough to look at the executable and determine which installers need to be included.

Anyway,  the point is moot. I just shipped the Labview Runtime installer, the EXE and support files. That ran just fine, even if it wasn't as slick as a single package.