SideBySide or Registration-Free Activation of Vulcan.NET/X# components

May 06
2016
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In this post I will try to list some things that are needed for registration-free use of Vulcan.NET or X# components in Visual Objects applications. Some of these issues have costed me several days of tries.

First, a background article from MSDN: How to: Configure .NET Framework-Based COM Components for Registration-Free Activation

Then: a big “Thank You” to Meinhard Schnoor who has helped me a lot not only with this issue, but often also with other issues.

How SxS (how I will call it to shorten) works basically? I’ll try to simplify at maximum what is needed and where the potential problems stay.

Normally, COM works only with “registered” components. This has some issues:

  • you can only register components from your local machine, not from a network share
  • you need administrative rights to register the component
  • the component registration is global for the machine, you cannot use different versions of the component

    • With SxS things are different:

  • components are called from the program directory without installation
  • every application can use the proper component version
  • of course no administration rights are needed

    • Unfortunately, SxS is very bad documented, and there are not many helpful articles and tools available. And if something goes wrong, it may be very difficult to find out the “why”. sxstrace.exe normally is a help, but not every time. Manifest caching can also disturb.

    Manifests

    Manifests are the basic mechanism for SxS, they are needed for both the component and the executable. The manifest for the component needs to specify the available classes and GUIDs, and the manifest for the executable needs to specify the name of the component. At loading time, the loader first reads the manifest for the executable and then the manifest for the component. If something goes wrong, you exe will not start. Look first in the event viewer and then use sxstrace to see the errors. Because of manifest caching it can be necessary to change the time stamp of your executable (best: regenerate it). Manifests can be standalone (name of the exe or dll with added .manifest extension), or built into the executable. My recommendation would be to use standalone manifests for development and embedded manifests for deployment.

    GUIDs

    Every class and also the interfaces need their own GUID – generate a new one with the guidgen tool (You’ll need the Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt for this). Please pay attention to use the right GUIDs!

    Versions

    The entire system is very sensible to versioning! You need to use the correct version in every place: manifests and component itself (an AssemblyInfo.prg with the correct AssemblyVersionAttribute and the AssemblyFileVersionAttribute entries is needed – otherwise SxS will give no errors, but don’t load the component! This alone has costed me several days of tries.

    Naming

    Correct naming is the next potential issue: this is not only important for the name of the DLL and for the name of the classes, but also for the namespace used in the component. Name the component the same as the used namespace (and use a namespace!) to save you troubles (with naming errors the registered assembly may work, the SxS loading will fail silently at runtime).

    Any error in one of the components will cause the failure of the entire loading mechanism.

    Written by wriedmann in: Visual Objects Programming, Vulcan.NET Programming, X# Programming |

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