how can I make a stand-alone exe in Visual Studio. Its just a simple Console application that I think users would not like to install a tiny Console application. I compiled a simple cpp file using the visual studio command prompt. Will the exe work even if the .NET framework is not installed? I used native C++ code.
+4
A:
Anything using the managed environment (which includes anything written in C# and VB.NET) requires the .NET framework. You can simply redistribute your .EXE in that scenario, but they'll need to install the appropriate framework if they don't already have it.
Joe
2010-01-09 21:52:49
Can I use C++/CLI or native C++ to compile it to an exe?
Mohit Deshpande
2010-01-09 22:00:50
It compiles to an exe no matter what. But if you try to run it it'll return an error if .NET isn't installed.
jalf
2010-01-09 22:02:38
Even navtive C++?
Mohit Deshpande
2010-01-09 22:04:33
I'm pretty sure that native, unmanaged C++ has nothing to do with .net. You can probably safely deploy it without having to worry about dependencies.
alex
2010-01-09 22:21:05
You can use unmanaged C++ to avoid the .NET runtime dependency, but depending on the version of Visual Studio the user might need the appropriate Visual Studio runtime DLLs (unless you completely statically link, which is not always 100% easy to do correctly.)
Joe
2010-01-09 22:27:05
+4
A:
Inside your project folder their is a bin folder. Inside your bin folder, there are 2 folders, a Release and a Debug. For your polished .exe, you want to go into your Release folder.
I'm not quite sure if thats what youre asking
Marlon
2010-01-09 21:52:56
A:
I agree with @Marlon. When you compile your C# project with the Release configuration, you will find into the "bin/Release" folder of your project the executable of your application. This SHOULD work for a simple application.
But, if your application have any dependencies on some external dll, I suggest you to create a SetupProject with VisualStudio. Doing so, the project wizard will find all dependencies of your application and add them (the librairies) to the installation folder. Finally, all you will have to do is run the setup on the users computer and install your software.
Pierre-Luc Champigny
2010-01-09 22:16:52
+1
A:
I've never had problems with deploying small console application made in C# as-is. The only problem you can bump into would be a dependency on the .NET framework, but even that shouldn't be a major problem. You could try using version 2.0 of the framework, which should already be on most PCs.
Using native, unmanaged C++, you should not have any dependencies on the .NET framework, so you really should be safe. Just grab the executable and any accompanying files (if there are any) and deploy them as they are; there's no need to install them if you don't want to.
alex
2010-01-09 22:33:54