Deploying XNA application which uses Kinect, using Setup Project

Question

I've created a game using Visual Studio 2010 C# using Kinect in XNA-4. I created a Setup project for that. The setup and the installed game works fine in my system; but when I deployed it (with the setup of pre-requisites) in my friends laptop, it didn't work. The installed game opens and closes immediately.

I have another XNA game with the main difference that it does not use Kinect. And its setup works perfectly fine even in his laptop. I guess its because of the dependency Microsoft.Kinect.dll.

I have shown the differences.

The dependencies in the Setup Project

The setup folder created looks like this if I select to include the pre-requisites setups.

The installed application folder looks like this.

It copies the Microsoft.Kinect.dll in the application folder. Does it really matter? Shouldn't it be somewhere within Windows folder even if he doesn't have any setup related to Kinect installed?

I don't think its necessary but I even tried to install everything I had (listed below) related to Kinect in his laptop but it gives the same problem.

• Setup_Windows_Kinect_1.1.exe
• KinectSDK-v1.8-Setup.exe
• KinectDeveloperToolkit-v1.8.0-Setup.exe

Please help me fix this.

Answer 1

It's important that users have the runtime DLLs for whatever libraries you use in your programs. Since you are using the Kinect for Windows library you should include that runtime redistributable installer, here is a link: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34811