foxpro application flashes

[grandestin]

I have an application used in drug store sale (pharmacie)for many years, when moving it to new pc does not work just flashes and closes immediately. the application requires runtime library witch I have installed but still no luck. I have been searching in internet and tried many suggested solution and still no function. I wonder if any programmer in this forum could help with it and would appreciate very much any effort, I can send it over to whom who is willing to help me, the applications files are only 16mb zipped and the runtime files about 18mb. In advance many thanks.

 

[Dan Freeman]

Well, come for a visit Olaf.

I can compile a VFP6 project in VFP7 and release it to users. The support calls will say "it doesn't do anything".

I can visit the user and double-click on the app icon and it won't do anything. No error message. Nothing.

It doesn't make any sense to me either, but I can reproduce it on any day. (And often do, unintentionally.)

VFP isn't always as predictable as we'd like to think it is.

 

[Olaf Doschke]

So maybe that message was just introduced in VFP8 or 9. If it's not in VFP6 or 7 it explains very well why the VFP5 app behaves this way.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[Dan Freeman]

No, the message was there from the beginning. The RT has to be well and fully, completely, not installed. If some parts of it are installed but dependencies are missing, things can get weird.

 

[grandestin]

OlafDoschke: I installed fresh new 32bit windows 7 then copied myapp folder over to new pc and clicked the exe then got error message: cannot locate the microsoft visual foxpro support library, then installed the runtime library (wich I found inside myapp folder) and got one error: could not register a file "AGENTCTL.DLL wich supposed to be a preveliedge issue then run it again as administrator and got no error but the agentctl.dll still not registred and when I try starting myapp.exe just flashes and disappear same behavior. Accoding to database files, they are all in same directory as myapp.exe, I copied the whole folder from the old working pc wich is acting as a server working properlig with 2 clients but too old with windows xp

danfreeman: when I look at the old working pc with xp I can see visual c++ 2008 and so installed visual c++ 2008 redistributable on new windows 7 machine, the result is the same.

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Rhere was no need to install Win7 32bit. There is a 32 bit subsystem in SysWoW64 (short for Sytem Windows32 on Windows64).

AGENTCTL.DLL is nothing Foxpro related. It must be very specific to your application and I can't tell you anything about it.

In Win7 it's not enough to run something as admin. If that process runs elevated the processes it spawns, eg calling regsrv32 still run with normal user rights.
The best thing you can do is run cdm as admin, that'll give you the command shell in admin mode, the title bar reflects that, then you may register that DLL, using C:\Windows\SysWow64\regsvr32.exe. Nor that you're on Win7 32bit you don't need to specify that folder, the command shell will know where to find regsvr32.

Good luck with that.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[Dan Olsson]

The app obviously uses MS Agent which means you can't use it on Win7 and above (and shows just this behaviour).
You COULD find MS Agent for Win 7 in KB 969168 but it won't work anymore since the security certificate has expired.

 

[Olaf Doschke]

I see - AGENTCTL.DLL is part of the MS Agents.

MS recommends a Hotfix, no telling it would not work due to a security certificate expiration, I'd go that route rather than installing XP mode.

Bye, Olaf.