I'm trying to compile my program in Visual C#. However, the machine I need it to run on (well, I need it to be able to run on any Windows Machine, at least Windows XP) does not have the .NET DLLs installed. I'm new to this, so how can I compile my Visual C# program with the runtime DLLs so that it will run on other machines?
+4
A:
You can't. .Net programs can only run if the .Net framework / CLR is installed on the target machine. There is no pure XCOPY deployment story for this scenario.
JaredPar
2010-07-21 15:29:28
+5
A:
There is no way. You need .NET runtime installed prior running any .NET application.
Yossarian
2010-07-21 15:29:40
Well I wish I would have known that before I made my program using Visual Studio...
rar
2010-07-21 15:33:32
That is not a Visual Studio limitation, its a C# one. If you use Visual Studio to write a C++ program, you could then xcopy deploy it to most windows machines, since they'll have the standard C++ libs
Nate Bross
2010-07-21 15:39:44
@rar, you can develop an unmanaged C++ application with Visual Studio that targets XP. Just make sure the project defines the WINVER variable to be NTDDI_WINXP (if you don't want to rely on any service packs being installed.) Change the runtime library in the compiler settings to /MT (so that the C runtime libraries are compiled in) and don't use ATL/MFC/Etc unless you can also compile them in.
David Gladfelter
2010-07-21 15:41:26
Problem is I've already coded it all in Visual C#, this would be a big task to change over.
rar
2010-07-21 15:42:53
@rar: As long it is possible to install .NET on the target machine, you have nothing to worry about. See my answer about using ClickOnce to detect dependencies on .NET, or installing a pre-compiled redistributable version of .NET.
FrustratedWithFormsDesigner
2010-07-21 15:52:10
There should'nt be any problem with including the redistributable with your application. A lot of commercial applications install .NET Framework if it's not already in the target machine.There are no reasons for not installing the framework. All virtual machines work like that: java, php, phyton ...
Carlos Muñoz
2010-07-21 15:54:00
+5
A:
If you use Click-Once deployment, you can set a setting in the installer that the installer should install the .NET framework before running. If that's not an option (such as target machine has slow/no internet connection) you can install the redistributable version of .NET
FrustratedWithFormsDesigner
2010-07-21 15:36:43