WIA interop deployment through VS ClickOnce

Question

I have an application that allows me to scan images on my development PC which works successfully. It uses the Microsoft Windows Image Acquisition COM ActiveX dll. I am running VS2008 on Windows 7 64 bit.

I am having problems trying to deploy the Interop dll using ClickOnce. This component is referenced through the VS project in the normal way (and copy local = true). When I install the application on a Windows XP machine, I get an error saying that the library is missing (i.e. it wasn't installed / registered correctly). Having looked in the System32 directory, the dll is not there, so it has to be deployed via my app.

After looking on the web and trying various solutions, I then tried Microsoft's 'Registration-Free COM' method here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165432%28VS.80%29.aspx

However, changing the Isolated property to True then caused 2 compilation errors due to duplicate entries in the registry. Having sorted out these entries out manually, I then deployed my app again with the supposedly isolated COM component, but when I try to scan a document I now get this message:

'The procedure entry point_except_handler4_common could not be located in the dynamic link library msvcrt.dll'

I feel like I'm going round in circles with this one. Can someone please enlighten me on how to deploy the WIA interop via ClickOnce for all versions of Windows from XP onwards?

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

Don't copy system DLLs from your Win7 machine to the XP machine, that can't work. It would have been easier if you named the file, I would guess at wiaaut.dll, the WIA Automation provider. It probably just isn't installed on the XP machine.

Ask the client to install this download on the machine. You don't need reg-free COM, these are system components.