Visual Crap 2005
Microsoft with Visual Studio 2005 and their .Net 3.0 went together with their Side-By-Side assemblies (WinSxS) which should make life of deploying applications to different Windows system easier. So far I have been only having a big problem with it, because no single program compiled with VS2005 can be used on a system where VS2005 has not been installed. Of course, one can somehow download SxS redistributable binaries, but how to find them on MSDN website is a one big mystery. Another thing is that applications do not complain what is wrong, they just do not start at all. Or sometimes they say "A program could not be started". Great!
Then there are more things coming together with it.... and those things are called "manifests". The manifests tell system what versions of libraries they need, etc... but the hell starts when you need to use dynamically loaded libraries into your application. Geez. Why doing all this mess when everything was already starting to work... Does Microsoft really have too many programmers and managers and they feel bored and tired and try to make "cool" things that no one yet done before? Maybe there are reasons why others do not go with this scheme? I really dunno what was the idea behind.
It is a side note, because overall seems that VS2005 is really a great compiler compared to it's previous versions. Optimizations have been improved and the code generation process has been also time optimized. Just they really want to go too far with certain things...
- Duddie's blog
- Login to post comments
What is exactly this WinSxS
What is exactly this WinSxS ? (The link in the article points to v4.kazzuya.com 8P)
It seems to me like you are the one that is trying to go after the latest untested stuff. .NET applications by themselves should work fine as long as one installs .NET, which I assume it's going to be standard on Vista and so on.
I dunno about the rest and something tells me it's better this way 8)
Yeah I never heard of WinSxS
Yeah I never heard of WinSxS either.
All our tools have been converted to build with vs2005 and I am not aware of any problems running them.
Personally I am the type of person that always likes to stay with the 'default' settings, so vs2005 seems to work fine for me. I did have an issue the other day though when I was linking in some win32 library for building display lists from Nintendo and got a link error about not finding libc.lib which as of vs2005 seems to no longer be a part of visual studio, the Nintendo library was built using vs2003. So there seem to be some backwards compatibility issues.
That's actually about libc
This is all about runtime libs that M$ used. crt, libc and their infamous MFC (MF Class?)
Fixed link
But it seems that I am not the only one having problems...
Even dudes at M$ are confused
M$ HELL
and some people get some clues that the system that was supposed to make apps portable is not portable at all
I think if you stay with
I think if you stay with c/c++ you will be mostly ok. But I do remember now that we tried to use managed c++ code at some point, and there were so many dll's and bullshit that had to come with those managed applications that we eventually gave up. Performance was a problem too, because something that needed only 1 second to run, would now spend 15 seconds searching and loading dll's.