dilettante
MIS
Has anyone else been working with this "new" feature? It came out as part of Windows XP (and later Windows versions) and offers an improved answer to DLL Hell. Basically it takes the ".local" DLL Redirection feature in Win2K and its contemporaries (WinMe and Win98SE?) and then pushes it to the next level.
The idea is to take the COM registration metadata of your dependencies and place it into XML manifests, either as files or embedded as resources. Then you just place those dependency libraries alongside your EXE. No component library installation, no regsvr32 runs. It just works.
Microsoft hasn't done much to document it for VB6 developers, and they've done nothing that I've seen in the way of tool support. They're still developing it though, and the VB6 SP6 runtime and WinXP SP2 work together to expand Reg-Free COM for VB6 programs. Works great in Vista too!
It can't help with ActiveX EXEs and DCOM, and there are a few bumps and roadblocks I haven't worked around yet. So far I have it working for a number of my projects though. I quickly found I needed to automate the manifest generation process, it just takes too long by hand.
The idea is to take the COM registration metadata of your dependencies and place it into XML manifests, either as files or embedded as resources. Then you just place those dependency libraries alongside your EXE. No component library installation, no regsvr32 runs. It just works.
Microsoft hasn't done much to document it for VB6 developers, and they've done nothing that I've seen in the way of tool support. They're still developing it though, and the VB6 SP6 runtime and WinXP SP2 work together to expand Reg-Free COM for VB6 programs. Works great in Vista too!
It can't help with ActiveX EXEs and DCOM, and there are a few bumps and roadblocks I haven't worked around yet. So far I have it working for a number of my projects though. I quickly found I needed to automate the manifest generation process, it just takes too long by hand.