[WHINGE]
I'm in the <long and tiresome> process of creating distribution files for my application. I'm using Installshield Express 2.12.
I'm feeling fairly competant with what i'm doing but now i'm wondering if i'm going about this the long long way.
The application uses Crystal reports <Version 5>. I'm trying to distribute for WinNT, and Win9x. I seem to be forever looking at support sites looking for updated dlls, ocxs etc to try and find a stable configuration that will work on all platforms.
Does anyone have any tips or little tricks that they find makes distributing their apps easier? I mean it seems to me that its a very manual process. I use tools to find the dependencies etc but it seems as though there are always *more* runtime files that need to be bundled.
The main problems i'm having is that the reports use the DAO engine and it's taken me forever to find some DLLs that seem to work across all platforms. I was getting all sorts of errors before like "Cannot Initialize OLE" and "Cannot create DAO DBEngine".
I think it's probably the fact that i'm using such an old version of crystal that is giving me most of the hassles.
Or at least does anyone else find that distributing their apps is the most frustrating part of the whole development process? I guess i'm just up for a whinge..
[/WHINGE]
