Register application. How to?

[Skill Jaan]

Ok, I have made an exe application which uses the following:

aamd532.dll
Advapi32.dll
Comdlg32.ocx
Mscomctl.ocx
mswinsck.ocx
Richtx32.ocx

All of these files are in the C:\Windows\System directory. The application works 100% all right on my computer but when I send it to my friends, it doesn't open. I was told that this is because the application is not registered on the computer of my friends because of which it does not open there. It is automatically registered on my computer because it is compiled on it. OK, now I have to make an application that registers it on the other computers.

I learnt that I needed these commands to register/unregister components:

Register: regsvr32 dllFileName.dll
UnRegister: regsvr32 /u dllFileName.dll

Ok, now what should I do? I dont know how to use these commands. And secondly, which components needs to be registered from the above ones? Because I think many of them will be already registered because they are so common. Should I only regsiter the .exe file?

Help !!!
Thanx

[radum]

you would normally register the dll's and ocx'es with a
regsvr32 name.dll
from the command line. but in your case, it would be better to use the package and deployment wizard to build a setup package, and distribute it to your friends in this form. pdw attempts to make sure that all the files needed to run your app will be included, and the setup program will do the registrations for you.

[Skill Jaan]

pdw attempts to make sure that all the files needed to run your app will be included, and the setup program will do the registrations for you

Hmm.. thanx radum

But I dont want to include all the files. I want to include the dlls only not the ocxs because these ocxs are very common and normally registered on all computers, and there size in aggregate is 1.44 mb and I dont want to add this size to my installer. The dlls are only 75 kb so I can afford to include them in the installer. How can I avoid including the ocx's in the installer made by the pwd.

Thankoo

[radum]

well, at the time the PDW runs, it shows you the list of files it is going to include in the CAB. you can remove files that are not needed, or you can add files that PDW doesnt know about. for example, if your app would require to load a bitmap file at one point in its operation, the PDW will not detect that the bitmap file will be needed, so you will have to add it yourself manually in the distribution list.

best way to figure out if your application will install correctly or not is to build the installation package, and then attempt to setup on a machine that has the operating system just installed. (you will be amazed to see how many ocx'es are missing from a freshly installed machine... most of the time, *all* of them are missing on the target machine. i can almost guarantee you that the ocx'es you have listed are missing from your client machines, unless some other VB application has installed them before.). if something goes wrong, uninstall the application from the target machine and opt to remove all 'shared' dll's, fix the problem, and do it again.

i would remove ocx'es from the installation packages *only* if i can be *absolutely* sure that *all* the target computers that my application will ever install on have those files. which is not usually the case, unfortunately. if you say 1.4MB is too much, wait and see what happens when you try to build a package that uses ADO data access... that thing by itself adds 8MB to your CAB.

[Skill Jaan]

While I was making the setup file using the deployment wizard, the following dialogue boxes appeared.

Below is a list of files for which dependency information could not be found, To proceed without the dependency information for the file(s), click OK. To permanently mark a file as having no dependencies, select its checkbox.

aamd532.dll

The wizard found dependency information for the listed files, but the information is out of date. To proceed with the out-of-date information, click OK.

Comdlg32.ocx
Mscomctl.ocx

What do they mean?

[kleinma]

dont worry about that message.. just continue and it will make a successful package

[radum]

regarding aamd532.dll, pdw basically says that it may require some dll's in its turn. for example, suppose you are building a dll yourself, my.dll, and it uses the Microsoft XML v3.0. that means that my.dll has msxml20.dll as a dependency, and pdw needs to know the dependencies of the dependencies as well, when you are building the disty pack. to achieve that, before creating the package for the main application, you would have to create 'dependency files' for all the dll's that you use in it (also using pdw). i have a feeling that aamd532.dll is not created by yourself; therefore you have to contact whoever built it and ask for a dependencies list. (sucks? oh, yeah...) you may be in luck and figure out that no dependencies are necessary for it, so you can 'proceed without dependency information' as pdw suggests.

regarding the other 2 ocx'es, what pdw says is that in your application you have used references to older versions of the comdlg and mscomctl, but newer versions have been found on your computer. since these are designed by microsoft, and theyre pretty good in maintaining backwards compatibility (at least one thing theyre good at...), you should be safe to 'proceed with out of date information'.

[Skill Jaan]

radum:

It really helped, thanx.

[kleinma]

if you are using visual studio 6, then you have the dependancy walker which is a program that can look at a DLL and see what other DLLs it needs to run properly.. you will notice most DLLs use the core windows ones like kernel,user,etc... but if there is a dll that has a reference that isn't a standard windows DLL.. then use this program to see what DLLs you will need to include