Infralution Support

[sgouri]

Hello,

Summary : Richtext cannot load on test / target machine. The net result is that even simple applications cannot be deployed on end user machine if they rely on Infralution.RichText.dll.

Details :

We have made an application. We build it on a development machine with an Infralution installation correctly activated with recently purchased license. We test the application on the development machine and on a test target machine. The target machine has no development tools, it mimicks the machine of the end user of the application.

To perform a test we copy the output of the bin/Release directory on the test machine and run it there.

An application that only instanciates a VirtualTree works on both machines.
An application that relies on Infralution.RichText.dll works on development machine and fails on the test machine.

Even the sample application "Rich Text Tree" bundled with Infralution does not work on the test machine.

The symptom is always the same. An exception (translated from french) :

[sgouri]

OS used on all machines is Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2, all updates applied. Infralution is v3.3.1 .

We installed another fresh XP Professional on another test machine with all updates and Framework .NET 2.0 from Microsoft Update (.NET 2.0 is an optional update). The results are exactly the same as with the first test machine.

A good practice is to attach a sample solution that exhibits the faulty behavior. Well, one of the solutions we tried is simply the solution that Infralution installs (on dev machines) in C:\Program Files\Infralution\VirtualTree3\Samples\VS2005\CS\RichTextTree

I am surprised that Infralution does not document this problem and how to solve it. We are not the first to consider deploying an Infralution-based product since RichText.dll depends on native code, are-we ?

Thank you for your attention.

[Infralution]

Is your test machine running the x64 version of XP? If so you will have the same issue referred to in the post. You need to compile your application with the Platform set to Win32.

We also test on clean installs of XP with SP2 and have not previously seen the issue you describe. However we will rerun these tests again to double check.

[sgouri]

[Infralution]

OK we've been able to replicate this problem and (we think) track the source of it down. We recently installed VS2005 SP1 in our development environment and unfortunately Microsoft have made a change to the way the C runtime (CRT) libraries are handled which has broken RichText DLL on clean systems.

The Virtual Tree installer installs the SP1 version of the CRT - which the RichText DLL uses. This means that the DLL will load OK provided the Virtual Tree installer has been run (ie on your development machine) - but on a totally clean machine the SP1 CRT libraries are missing and the assembly does not fall back to using the standard CRT libraries which are installed.

We intend to get a fix out for this ASAP (probably tomorrow).
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Infralution Support

[sgouri]

[Infralution]

We will also look at removing the dependence on the RichText if it is not actually being used (if this is possible).
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Infralution Support

[Infralution]

We have now released version 3.3.3 which removes the dependency on the SP1 versions of the CRT libraries. This should fix the issue with deploying on systems that do not have these libraries installed. We have also modified Virtual Tree so that deployment of the RichText dll is not required if you aren't using RichText features. See the announcement in this forum for more details.
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Infralution Support

[sgouri]