Managing without .NET for runtime applications

[Jerry Spence1]

My company produces IP Surviellance softwrae (CCTV, Access control etc) and
one of the features of our software is the ability to produce a CD with all
the images, together with a run time version of the viewer. The intention is
that anyone (the police) can insert the CD into any PC and see the video
sequence.

This all worked OK (ish) in VB6, but we always suffered from data access
components, DLL hell etc. We have now upgraded to VB2005 using .NET 2.0.

The problem is that our CD Viewer requires .NET to be installed on the
target machine and we can't rely on the end user having Internet access, or
Administrator rights, or the ability to pre-install .NET. I was wondering if
there was a way of producing a package with just the elements of .NET that
was being used, so that these could be written to the CD. Any other
thoughts?

-Jerry

 

[jeff]

I have a similar issue ... but the problem is ... once you choose to use
..Net, you are at the mercy of the host PC ... and it MUST have the latest
..Net framework (or relavent .Net framework) installed. Or the user must
have access to and security rights for installing the necessary .Net
Framework.

I have yet to find a work around! >Net works for a controlled environment,
but stinks when you have not control over a target PC ...

 

[Robinson]

My company produces IP Surviellance softwrae (CCTV, Access control etc)
and one of the features of our software is the ability to produce a CD
with all the images, together with a run time version of the viewer. The
intention is that anyone (the police) can insert the CD into any PC and
see the video sequence.

This all worked OK (ish) in VB6, but we always suffered from data access
components, DLL hell etc. We have now upgraded to VB2005 using .NET 2.0.

The problem is that our CD Viewer requires .NET to be installed on the
target machine and we can't rely on the end user having Internet access,
or Administrator rights, or the ability to pre-install .NET. I was
wondering if there was a way of producing a package with just the elements
of .NET that was being used, so that these could be written to the CD. Any
other thoughts?

You can run a little stub program to detect if .NET is installed, if it is
you run as normal, if it isn't you prompt the user to install it (ship the
runtime installer on your CD). If the user is motivated enough to run your
program, he will call his system administrator or make other suitable
arrangements - it takes 5 minutes to install and it's a 1-time thing. Note
that the .NET framework has been available for ages on Windows Update and a
lot of corporates have it installed in one form or another by default.

You might also consider another technology for this, such as a Flash
presentation (if it's just an image viewer) or simple web page.

 

[Jerry Spence1]

You can run a little stub program to detect if .NET is installed, if it is
you run as normal, if it isn't you prompt the user to install it (ship the
runtime installer on your CD). If the user is motivated enough to run
your program, he will call his system administrator or make other suitable
arrangements - it takes 5 minutes to install and it's a 1-time thing.
Note that the .NET framework has been available for ages on Windows Update
and a lot of corporates have it installed in one form or another by
default.

You might also consider another technology for this, such as a Flash
presentation (if it's just an image viewer) or simple web page.

Bearing in mind the CD could be used on a courtroom PC with no prior notice,
I can not require .NET to be installed. I am starting to find products that
extract the various bits you need from the framework. Typing deploying .net
without framework into google seems to have produced some results.

-Jerry

 

[Robinson]

Bearing in mind the CD could be used on a courtroom PC with no prior
notice, I can not require .NET to be installed. I am starting to find
products that extract the various bits you need from the framework. Typing
deploying .net without framework into google seems to have produced some
results.

-Jerry

Sounds rather dodgy to me and not supportable through future versions (I
would assume) if you take it apart DLL by DLL and dump them onto your CD,
not forgetting potentially having to register components....... There is a
difference between a framework and a library and .NET is not really a
library in that sense. I would be inclined to use another technology.
Something instantly available, of which there are many possibilities,
including sticking with VB 6, using VC++, Flash, HTML etc. But if you want
to hack .NET apart as the best solution, I would say someone made a bad
decision to build the software with .NET in the first place.

 

[Rad [Visual C# MVP]]

Hey Jerry,

Take a look at Thinstall
http://www.thinstall.com/solutions/net_virtual.php

This might be exactly what you company needs

 

[Jerry Spence1]

Yes it is exactily what is needed. However at $4,995 + $39 that can wait!

It did get me searching though and I found www.xenocode.com . I have
evaluated Xenocode Postbuild 2007 Professional and it works a treat. And it
is only $399.

Well happy.

-Jerry