Side by side madness - running binaries on the same computer

Question

Here's my configuration:

• Computer A - Windows 7, MS Visual Studio 2005 patched for Win7 compatibility (8.0.50727.867)
• Computer B - Windows XP SP2, MS Visual Studio 2005 installed (8.0.50727.42)

My project has some external dependencies (prebuilt DLLs - either build on A or downloaded from the Internet), a couple of DLLs built from sources and one executable. I am mostly developing on A and all is fine there. At some point I try to build my project on computer B, copying the prebuilt DLLs to the output folder. Everything builds fine, but trying to start my application I get

The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0150002)....

The event log contains two of those:

Dependent Assembly Microsoft.VC80.CRT could not be found and Last Error was The referenced assembly is not installed on your system.

plus the slightly more amusing

Generate Activation Context failed for some.dll. Reference error message: The operation completed successfully.

At this point I'm trying my Google-Fu, but in vain - virtually all hits are about running binaries on machines without Visual Studio installed. In my case, however, the executables fail to run on the computer they are built.

Next step was to try dependency walker and it baffled me even more - my DLLs built from sources on the same box cannot find MSVCR80.DLL and MSVCP80.DLL, however the executable seems to be alright in respect to those two DLLs i.e. when I open the executable with dependency walker it shows that the MSVC?80.DLLs can be found, but when I open one of my DLLs it says they cannot. That's where I am completely out of ideas what to do so I'm asking you, dear stackoverflow :)

I admit I'm a bit blurry on the whole side-by-side thing, so general reading on the topic will also be appreciated.

Answer 1

Your question has the answer to your problem: Computer A has VC runtime of version 8.0.50727.867, and Computer B has only version 8.0.50727.42.

You built your libraries on Computer A, and they depend on version 867 of VC runtime. (This can be found in manifest embedded in the libraries.) When you copy them to Computer B, these libraries still require version 867 of the runtime but you have only version 42.

To resolve the VC runtime assembly dependencies, you have to install VC runtime redistributables of version 867 on Computer B. However, I'd advise you to update Visual Studio on Computer B so that you have the same version on both computers. And even better, install Visual Studio 2005 SP1 on both computers and then install this security update to SP1. After installing the latter, your libraries will depend on version 8.0.50727.4053.

Answer 2

it's possible the problem is related with different versions of CRT runtime installed on both machines. is it possible to build all your modules to use statically linked CRT runtime to verify this?

Answer 3

first I'd check that prebuilt dlls by preparing dummy project to load them

Answer 4

I recently had the same type of error when building projects on one machine and then moving them to another machine. The biggest culprit here is likely a debug configuration for one of the binary components. That is, MSVC has the fairly rigid requirement of all DLLs/EXEs being built with the same runtime library, debug or release, otherwise they will not work together.

When I had this happen they also tend to compile just fine, but when you attempt to run them you get that extremely cryptic error message.

You need to ensure that every module you build together uses the same configuration, thus debug or release through the entire build chain. This error also likely comes up with mismatches in other libraries, so make sure your MSVC is the exact same version on the machines where you are building.