Activex usage under limited xp user?

[planchton]

How do i make a VB6.0 compiled exe with Activex dependencies to work on a limited XP user,since I don't have contact with administrator?

[dilettante]

It depends on how complex the EXE and its dependencies are.

As long as your target platform is Windows XP or later, you could use new technology Microsoft introduced with Windows XP to do this. It is a bag of technologies called Registration Free COM, isolated applications, and side-by-side assemblies - but it comes down to one thing.

You need to create appropriate application and assembly manifests for your application.

I played with this recently and have a small amount of experience with it. Microsoft doesn't provide much in the way of information, tools, or other developer support for doing it with VB 6.0 so I chose to "roll my own."

For simple scenarios you could write a utility in VB that scans a VB project and generates an XCopy deployment folder. I did that and it took about a day of frogging around to get it working for simple programs. You just point it to your program's project file (*.vbp) and it creates the manifests and tracks down the ActiveX libraries, then it puts all of these items in an XCopy folder along with the EXE.

Then you can just burn the folder's contents to a CD or put it on a flash drive, and carry it to any XP (or 2003, or Vista) machine. No setup, no registration required!


Today I found a guy selling a product online that does this (and a lot more of course). He wants about $1000 for a 5-developer license. I didn't see any 1-seat license. I guess I'll stick with mine for now.

[dilettante]

This isn't perfect, but it may do what you need as long as:

• You have the .vbp file, and your .exe file already compiled.
• You "build" this deployment folder on a machine with all of the ActiveX libraries your program uses present and registered, and the VB 6.0 development system installed.
• Your EXE is fairly simple and only uses ActiveX DLLs and OCXs directly (i.e. no OCXs that use other OCXs or ActiveX DLLs).
• All of your ActiveX libraries are used in-process (no use of ActiveX EXEs and such).
• You run the finished product on Windows XP (or 2003, or Vista) as your target platform.

Note that you can build your deployment folder using any Win32 OS, you just can't run without an installer on OSs before XP.

In any case you have little to lose by trying it. See the ReadMe file for more information. You run the program and it asks you just one question (a file open dialog asking for your .vbp file).

To use my program you'll need to compile it first. It only requires a normal VB compile, from the IDE or the command line. All you need at runtime is the resulting EXE, any other components used are system components or part of the VB 6.0 development system itself.