I am currently developing a standalone application using C#, and I am facing a problem for which I can't find a solution. Indeed, my script uses two libraries (provided by an external company), however, one is made for 64-bit systems and the other for 32-bit systems. So here is my problem, as soon as I try to use both libraries at the same time, I always get an error:
System.BadImageFormatException
I've already tried to build my project for "Any CPU", "x64" and "x86" but I always have the same problem.
So I would like to know if it is possible to solve this problem in order to be able to use both libraries in the same script or is there another technique to achieve the same result?
Thank you in advance,
Clément
If the libraries use third-party standard windows dlls this will be a lot harder.
However, just decompile the library, and rebuild it in your chosen bitness.
Note 1 : Beware this might be infringing licence agreements
Note 2 : Some decompilers might be a little hit and miss
Related
I have made a Windows Form Application in C# using Visual Studio 2012. Can I publish this as a portable application to windows machines ?
P.S. portability here I am referring is working with any Windows( preferably windows 7 or 8 ) machine without installation and .net framework
Yup.
All you need to do is sheep your bin folder. It has your executable and all dependencies.
No installation will be required.
Just bear in mind that in order to be really portable, you will need to make sure that your application does not modify registries or computer configurations.
(from wikipedia:)
A portable application (portable app), sometimes also called
standalone, is a program designed to run on a compatible computer
without being installed in a way that modifies the computer's
configuration information.
You can if you do not have any dependencies, e.g. you have only the .EXE. If you have some .dlls you can use ILMerge to merge them into one .EXE
Depends on what you understand under portable. Avi's answer certainly works, as does ILMerge, but there's also the one file, no installation needed approach to portability.
I tread carefully because I don't want to advertise any application or another, but apart from taking the entire /bin folder, I've played around with Cameyo in the past and that seems to do a pretty decent job at virtualizing (and rendering portable) most applications as long as they aren't too large (or maybe have too many dependencies on what have you, not sure). Alternative tools may exist, I haven't researched any of them recently and neither do I prefer or affiliate myself with any of them.
Seems to work fine for your average app. I've tried to virtualize Visual Studio, that was fun. Big no-no. Who knows, it might suit your needs. It still doesn't take away the need for a .NET framework installed on the target machine though. As I mention in comment, that might be something for .NET Native (and, at time of writing, the future).
I am creating a project on C#-.Net. The 'exe' file generated from the project is not executable on machines which do not have the .Net already installed. This error is popping up:
To run this application you first must install one of the following versions of the .NET.Framework: V4.0.30319
I don't want to make an installer file which installs the dependency files (.Net FW and other...) on PC.
As project requirement, I want to make an 'exe' that runs on every Windows PC without installing software or dependency sofware -> .Net FW. Just when clicked and the s/w exe should execute.
Is it possible to make such machine independent 'exe' for Windows from .Net ??
That's not exactly possible (there are some tools out there that will allow you to bundle dependencies, but I wouldn't recommend using them).
Your best possible approach to this is using an as-old-as-possible framework, for example .NET Framework 3.0. This way you'll use a framework version that is already preinstalled on pretty much all systems in use. Or in other words, you'll ensure your program runs on as many systems as possible out of the box. Just provide a link to the runtime in case someone is still missing it.
Also just to note that this is far better compared to what happened to the first few iterations of the .NET Framework: Those executables would just crash with a complex error message not telling the user that it's just the runtime missing. It improved a lot over time.
Also, just as an alternative: Have you thought about using ClickOnce deployment? This will allow you to provide users a simple and minimal installer they won't really see either. It will only download and install dependencies that are still missing. Also this is built into any edition of VisualStudio, even the Express ones.
This error is popping up
It is not an error. Just a friendly reminder to the user that your program need .NET 4 to be available before your program can run. He'll click "Yes, please!" and everything solves itself automagically.
You could create an installer to avoid the message. But, given that you don't want to do that, and it already takes care of it for you, there is very little point.
More about what this all looks like and why it works this way in this answer
"As project requirement, I want to make an 'exe' that runs on every Windows PC without installing software or dependency sofware -> .Net FW. Just when clicked and the s/w exe should execute.".
1) What if the version of Windows doesn't have any .Net Framework?
2) What if the version of Windows doesn't support any version of .Net Framework? (.Net didn't come around until Win2K/ME ish times, and Windows 95 won't take most .Net frameworks, 3.1 / 3.5 wont even take Mono)
"Is it possible to make such machine independent 'exe' for Windows from .Net ??"
Sounds like you're trying to make something like a Setup.exe that can be a single download that will work out the specifics after the fact... Actually the "machine independent" makes even C++ unsuitable, because while C++ will work on Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix, and a whole slew of more exotic systems with x86, x64, i64, PPC, ARM24/32/64 etc. (all of which exist with Windows installed on them, out there, in the wild, but are pretty rare) once the executable is compiled and linked, it will be targeted towards a single CPU architecture and OS. (OS/2, GEM and DOS all use .exe files, and there are some similarities between them, but most other OS don't require any specific file extension for executable binaries)
So, .Net isn't a terrible idea for this reason, any more than a .jar, .pl or .py would be. (which is relatively common for *nix software that you hope will run on Linux, Mac and BSD Unix... maybe even Solaris or HP/UX etc.) If you target MSIL, rather then x86 or x64, then your .exe will run on PPC Windows, DEC Alpha Windows, Itanium Windows, and ARM Windows, as well as the other two. (although this isn't what you are asking about) If you build it without a dependence on the WPF, or other Windows specific GUI engine, it will also work on Mac, Linux and BSD, so long as they have Mono installed. (it just may be worth considering, while you're at it... Versions of Windows Microsoft don't support with the appropriate .Net version will also need Mono to work this way)
To that end, I would recommend building a command-line executable in Mono, rather than .Net development environment. (Mono executable will run on .Net easier than .Net executables run on Mono... Though either is possible if you are careful about the dependencies you include in headers you import into your source)
I've had some success with this, writing a background service that would install on either Windows or Linux with the same binary executable. I used MonoDevelop. (https://www.monodevelop.com/) However, it's really just a flashy IDE around the core Mono development tools. (https://www.mono-project.com/)
I'm working on a simulator that models very complex interactions between many objects, and I mean millions.
I've used XNA because of the useful things that it lets me do easily, especially with the rendering.
My problem is that I'm running into OutOfMemoryExceptions after only a few seconds of simulation. I quickly realized that my program is only running in 32-bit mode, so I only get a few GBs of my somewhat larger amount of RAM.
How can I run an XNA game in 64-bit mode?
XNA used to be 32-bit only. You can try to compile to 64-bit, but then you are going to have issues because there won't be any 64-bit XNA libraries to load up. Everything I have found trying to back this up has been comments reminding viewers to compile as x86.
To compile as x64: Right-Click on your solution and go to Configuration Manager. From there select x64 as your Active Solution platform. You may have to create it and then select all your projects as x64. You could also try building as Any CPU since you are on 64-bit Windows, it should automatically start up in 64-bit mode.
EDIT: I found one of my old VM's that had XNA 4 installed on it. It appears that there is not a way to force it to compile to 64-bit. Even when I try to create a new platform, it will only allow me to select x86.
This does not directly answer the question. I've already upvoted TyCobb's answer.
I've run into the same issue in the past.
Have you considered switching to SlimDX? It's a wrapper around DirectX and allows you to develop .Net applications using DirectX. According to the documentation:
SlimDX sports complete support for both 32 and 64 bit targets.
It might not be as user-friendly as XNA, but I think it could be a good option for you.
We have a console app that runs in .NET 3.5. It connects to a USB device and spits out data received from it.
I'd like to port this over to OSX and have some questions about the strategy to do this. The USB Driver is already installed on OSX.
Mono looks promising but I don't get it. Does the end user have to install Mono or run something?
After looking at some other posts it seems that you can write a bash script and do some hacking to get the program installed...but I can't find a really good explanation of this. it also seems that mono wouldn't be installed in this process. These posts were also from '09 so I'm wondering if something has changed to make this easier.
My question is, what's a good way to approach running/porting a C# console app to OSX.
.NET is compiled down to IDL (bytecode) on all platforms including the windows platform. It is then run on the CLR (common language runtime iirc) which is a similar concept to the Java Virtual Machine. It just so happens that on most Windows machines that this CLR is installed by default. So if you wish your application to run on another platform you first need a CLR for that platform. Mono does include a CLR which can run on OSX. So either you (as part of your package/ bundle ) or the user would need to install this before your .NET will run.
The other issue you have is that .NET also contains certain API's which are not part of the ECMA standard which your application may or may not use. Some of these API's are present in mono, some of them are not. Those that are not usually have an equivalent or similar API which you can use to achieve the same thing however you may need to alter your application to deal with that scenario.
It really depends on what .NET api's your application is using as to how difficult it will be to port. I am guessing you are probably using winforms as part of your application so here is the guide from the mono site for that portion of the API
http://www.mono-project.com/Guide:_Porting_Winforms_Applications
You can bundle the Mono installer with your application (or your own build of Mono). You might even have the option of statically linking the mono runtime into your application on the Mac, I can't remember if it's supported (yet) or not. I'm pretty sure you can.
Also, wrt gordatron's warnings, if you use Path.Combine() to create paths instead of hard-coding \ as your path separator (which you should be doing anyway), you won't have to worry about having file system path problems.
For a nice easy way to check if your app uses any features which aren't available in Mono, you can use http://www.mono-project.com/MoMA to check for unsupported methods/classes and any other potentially non-cross-platform blockers like P/Invokes.
For a console application, I don't see you running into many issues (although you'll likely need to interface with the USB hardware differently than you do in Windows).
I'm very newbie to Ubuntu OS and I have my solution developed in visual studio 2008.
I want my application to run in both windows and Linux(ubuntu).
I've few questions in my mind.
Does mono support visual debugger .
If I start development using
mono.Is it possible to run same in
.net framework (windows) ?? or do I
need to write the NSI script to
download the libraries during
installation from internet and
install.
What is the best way to
achieve platform independence.
Thanks in advance.
Yes, Mono has a debugger - see MonoDevelop.
Assuming you don't use any Mono-specific libraries, or ship them alongside your app, it should just work in Windows against the Microsoft .NET implementation - although of course you'd want to test it.
A lot of achieving platform independence is a matter of the libraries you use: make sure whatever you want to call is either already available in both platforms or can be shipped alongside your app. Beyond that, there are obvious things like not assuming a particular path/directory separator, potentially not assuming a particular endianness (although that's rarely an issue in C# in my experience) - and regular testing, both manual and automated as far as possible.
There is an Mono add-in for Visual Studio that warns you when building your app if you use something that Mono doesn't support yet.
Don't remember the name, thought.