[VB6] XP/Vista/Win7 Manifest Creator

[dilettante]

I'm a little confused.

I understand why you'd want to select the newer GDI+ assembly for programs written for Vista or later. But I assume that's because you want to use that version's newer capabilities.

Since it doesn't exist in most cases in XP though, how can you just use the older assembly? Your calls wil fail?

Or are you additionally expecting the program to be written to use error trapping around a "test call" to some 1.1 function to set a flag causing the program to skip using 1.1 calls from then on?


Also, if some program is found fiddling with an important global registry setting like that one you mentioned I'd consider it malware. This isn't the reputation you want any of your software getting.

As far as I can tell, the proper way to handle this sort of thing would be to avoid selecting this assembly via the manifest. Instead you could use the SxS calls after testing the version of Gdiplus.dll or the OS version.


But I'm no GDI+ expert, and certainly not 1.0 vs. 1.1 literate. Not trying to drag this off topic, but I see:

Note If you are redistributing GDI+ to a downlevel platform or a platform that does not ship with that version of GDI+ natively, install Gdiplus.dll in your application directory.

I also see: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en...ng=en&id=18909

But maybe that's just the 1.0 version of the library?

I wouldn't put it in the application directory (bad, bad advice there with nasty potential consequences for VB6 programs) nor use a .local file (completely obsolete). But one can easily put it into a subdirectory of the application's directory to isolate it, and then have the manifest for the application redirect to it there.

You use the loadFrom attribute of the <file> tag to do this, the value of this attribute is a relative or absolute path to the redirected, isolated library.