Re: No need to distribute VB runtime files?

[chrislong2]

None of this is needed. I myself am a longtime VB6 developer and have a full Installer program developed with VB6 that is semi-widely distributed.

Here's the facts:

VB6 runtime IS installed BY THE OS on ME, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista
It also is installed by SP4 and greater for NT 4.0, which ANYONE running NT4 is going to have.

That leaves 95 and 98 which might not have the runtime. But most will as it has likely been installed by some other program in the past. I have conducted several studies on this over the years. Based on my June 2007 stats, if you do NOT include the runtime, you will have about 1-2% of total users that can't run your program if you don't include the runtime. Those users will be 95/98 users primarily.

You do NOT need to distribute the runtime to an OS that already has the runtime. If you really want to ensure that 100% of your users can use your program, go ahead. But you don't need to and quite frankly in this day and age really isn't needed anymore. Also as noted by another poster, you should definitely avoid distributing on Vista, although in my testing Vista seems to protect its VB runtime quite well - I have seen no issues with this.

This lack of need to distribute the VB runtime is now one of VB6's great strengths as compared to .Net (despite what some ill-informed people think). While the .NET framework already comes in 3 different flavors (not even counting the 32-bit vs. 64-bit flavors and v3.0) and varying depending on OS, SP, etc., the *1* VB6 runtime is ALREADY installed on basically everything from 2000/ME forward and most machines before that as well.

By the way, my installer is called SSE Setup (www.ssesetup.com). The last release is almost a year old now, but a MAJOR (and I mean MAJOR) update is coming soon. I have many VB6 developers that use it as their installer. (don't think I'm trying to bash Inno Setup though because I'm not - I do like Inno Setup).

Edit: Posts split from thread http://vbforums.com/showthread.php?t=491859 in order to preserve the original thread as we are on a new variation of the topic.