Running a WPF application on Windows XP

Question

I recently built a new application using WPF, so that I can learn the new technology. Now that I am trying to deploy the application, it appears as if it is running fine on a Vista system, but on a Windows XP SP2 machine with the .Net fx 3.5SP1, it's not able to load the PresentationFramework.dll file.

I did some further investigation into this and discovered that there is a slight build difference between the PresentationFramework.dll files on my xp test machines vs. what is on my Vista development machine.

What I'm curious about is if anyone else has run into this issue as well, and what they did to remedy the situation so that they could develop on Windows Vista, but deploy the developed application to both Vista and XP clients.

Thanks.

I need to add to this a bit... on the vista machine and on the client machine, I've got .Net Fx 3.5 SP1. I had done a bit of digging, and found out that the PresentationFramework.dll file is the same, except the last set of versioning numbers.

Has anyone found a decent work around for this issue?

Answer 1

You can have this problem sometimes with templates and Blend, although I thought it had been fixed in the latest Blend. Basically when Blend "pulls in" information for making a new template, it can sometimes copy in Aero only stuff from Vista, which means the control you then create is then reliant on Vista :-(

I did think this was fixed though, although you may have been bitten by it if the project has taken a while to put together.

Answer 2

Make sure that .NET Version on your Vista and XP machine are same.

Answer 3

I've done a bit more experimentation and built a test WPF project and used a Setup and Deployment project instead of a WiX installer. for some reason, the application is working fine when its installed with the Setup and Deployment installer, but when using WiX, it's having issues...

Beginning to think the issue has to do with WiX, and not the .Net Fx version/build

Answer 4

Sorry that I left this stagnant, but I figured out the issue I was running into. Turned out that there was corruption in the Windows XP box I was using as a test bed.

I was working between stackoverflow and another forum for the package I was writing the Add-in for. When I learned of the answer, this is what I posted, in case I ran into issue in the future.

I thought that I'd post this here, so that I would have reference, and also in case anyone else would need reference to it for the future... I'm working on another Dinerware Add-on using WPF, and although it was running fine on my development machine, every time I'd go to run it on a test machine (a machine ghosted like it was in the field at a customer's location), I kept getting weird processing errors.

I did hours of searching online, only to come up empty handed until I ran across this article:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wpf/thread/6e5de3d8-fc02-4504-b00f-7a2192d24a48/

which gives a link to the download of the WIC (Windows Imaging Components), located here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8e011506-6307-445b-b950-215def45ddd8&displaylang=en

For some reason, what is/was happening is that the Windows Imaging components have become corrupt against what my application is looking for. TO fix the issue, you have to:

1) navigate to %windir%\$NtUninstallWIC$\spuninst\ and run the spuninst.exe file in there. That will remove the Windows imaging components. 2) after you have completely removed the components, you will then re-install them using the second link from above.

So far, I've not run into any further issues.

What a crazy thing that was?!?!?!?!?!?!!

Hopefully, if someone else runs into this issue, I may be able to help them out quick by >putting this out there.

As I said on that forum... hopefully this helps someone else out that runs into this issue in the future.