what does registering a dll do

[Jeffro]

I recently had problems with Money 2004. I was able to fix the problem after
receiving a suggestion from a user formum. The explantion from the M.S.
Knowledge base said the problem was caused by The Msxml3.dll file that Money
uses to authenticate your .NET Passport is not registered.
I ran the following command to fix the problem:

Type regsvr32 msxml3.dll in the Open box.


Can someone explain what registering a dll does or why it causes a problem.

Thanks
Jeffro

 

[Vanguard]

I recently had problems with Money 2004. I was able to fix the problem
after
receiving a suggestion from a user formum. The explantion from the
M.S.
Knowledge base said the problem was caused by The Msxml3.dll file that
Money
uses to authenticate your .NET Passport is not registered.
I ran the following command to fix the problem:

Type regsvr32 msxml3.dll in the Open box.


Can someone explain what registering a dll does or why it causes a
problem.

Thanks
Jeffro

Registering a DLL puts the path to the file in the registry where it can
be looked up. That eliminates the problem of the program (or another
program that also uses that same DLL) from having to hunt around for it.
Might be in the same directory as the program that uses it. Might be in
a system path, like the Windows directory. Might be in a directory
that's included in the PATH environment variable (although there is no
guarantee that the shell in which the program executes will have the
same or correct value for the PATH environment variable). So how do you
guarantee that any program can find your DLL file? Record its path in
the registry. Think of it as having a shortcut to wherever the file is
stored but putting that shortcut where everyone knows where to find it.

Because the DLLSelfRegister function gets called from within the DLL
when it gets registered, more gets performed than just recording where
to find its file in registry. See:

http://support.installshield.com/kb/view.asp?articleid=q100065
http://delphi.about.com/od/windowsshellapi/l/aa040803a.htm

When you register the DLL, you are executing code within it. If you
want more detailed or more accurate answers, post in a newsgroup for
programming. This is just a *basics* newsgroup.