It appears to me as though the "Enable the Visual Studio hosting process" option on the Project Properties => debug tab is checked by default for both Debug and Release Configurations. If this item is checked, it seems that this results in the creation of a appname.VSHost.exe executable and associated configuration file that is used when running in the Visual Studio environment.
If this is the case, is there a reason why this option is set by default for Release Configurations since it seems this file would not be needed for a prod release? Is there any benefit to keeping it? I am tempted to remove it but the previous release included it and I hate to fix what ain't broken.
Also, I noticed that in both the Debug and Release folders that two new files that were not in the last release were created: AppName.application and appName.exe.Manifest. The previous release was compiled with VS2010 as was this and the .NET Framework is unchanged at 2.0. What might be responsible for these 2 fiels now appearing in both folders? Also, what differences would you normally expect to see between WinForms Release and Debug folders? I like having as much opportunity for debug info in errors messages as possible and I thought that dbg files were related to that. I assume that the compile optin "Generate Debug Info" is responsible for that at the expense of making your app clightly more transparent to hackers.
You can disable the hosting process (both in debug and release builds). It is only there to improve the debugging experience. Note that there are times when you do want/need to debug a release build, and the hosting process makes this potentially more functional.
For details on what it adds, see the Hosting Process page on MSDN.
That being said, you wouldn't deploy the *.vshost.exe files with your application. Having VS create them does not detract in any way, so it's typically harmless to leave these in place.
Related
detailed message box texti made a winform application on my pc and it runs fine. but when I tried to run it on another PC by copying the exe file and other dll files there , the application failed to run and all of a sudden it shows a dialog box to close the aplication.
please refer to screenshot of error.
enter image description here
Like bassfader said: One possible explanation is that your application is handling files during startup. In that case: integrate more extensive exception handling for those parts. Potentially with logging, to locate the problem
In my experience this however is more often a case of missing some kind of dependency.
Double check .NET runtimes. Lookup the target .net version in Visual Studio and run the installer on the target machine.
Investigate if your app uses any assemblies that are not part of the .NET framework. Sometimes these are not copied to the bin directory if they are in the GAC (ensure the flag "Copy Local" is set to "Always" in Visual Studio)
Ensure you have copied the whole bin folder
Check compiler output to see if you've got Platform mismatches. IIRC this can sometimes work fine on a dev machine but cause problems when Visual Studio is missing or you get to a different OS.
So, the problem that I am having is that when I push F5, or click Start, Visual Studio starts debugging, but the application doesn't actually build. If I go to my Task Manager, and look for the process it isn't there. Or, if I alt-tab between the programs I had open. I have had this problem twice now. The last projet I started, I encountered this problem. I spent days looking for answers on my time off but couldn't find anyhting. So i started a new project. And now I'm getting the same thing. If I go to my source tree and go back to a previous build and discard my changes, it works fine. But the problem comes back. Its not my coding. I am not getting any build errors. And I don't have any break points. So i can't hit continue. PLease alos note, that between it working, and not working I have not changed ANY setings in Visual Studio. I will post what I have tried. If I forget anything, please forgive me. I have days and days of history to go through in my browser.
Restarted Computer and VS
Ran VS in Admin
Always Build is selected in Tools -> Options -> Projects and
Solutions -> Build and Run
Make sure project is set to Debug in Solution Configuration and
Build is checked in Configuration Manager.
Make sure Only BUild startup projects and dependencies on run is
unchecked
Clean Solution
Unchecked Enable the Visual Studio hosting process in Project ->
Properties -> Debug tab
Made sure vshost32.exe was not running in the background while
program was not running in the Task Manager.
Deleted contents of bin and obj files in my project folder file and
reset computer.
Tried running the program from the exe in previously mentioned
bin/obj file. (The last one does start the process in Task Manager. But still doesnt show in the task bar, or alt tab.)
None of these have worked. I am getting very frustrated at this. Maybe I am not looking for the right thing in Google...
I suggest you close all third party tools/processes like the Anti-virus or others, and then re-debug it.
Or
You could run your VS in safemode:
devenv /SafeMode
Some community members found that the symbols loaded is really slow recently, and this issue has been report the Microsoft product team, so please also disable the Microsoft symbols server under TOOLS->Options->Debugging->Symbols. Debug it again.
I have a Visual Studio solution which I'm trying to build using the Incredibuild tool. Two of the projects in the solution work in tandem - the first project (we'll call it "Project A") builds an executable (foo.exe) which can parse a data file in the second ("Project B") to generate some header files.
Obviously there is a dependency on Project A defined in Project B. If I use Incredibuild's Rebuild Project option on Project B, it correctly builds Project A and foo.exe is successfully built. Project B has a custom build tool file which should cause foo.exe to be ran with a command-line argument to the file it's supposed to parse. However, trying to launch foo.exe in this way always returns an error:
CustomBuild:
Running Foo
'path to executable\foo.exe' is not recognized as an internal or
external command, operable program or batch file.
C:\Program Files
(x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\V140\Microsoft.CppCommon.targets(171,5):
error MSB6006: "cmd.exe" exited with code 9009.
Interestingly, if I then use Incredibuild to build only Project B (i.e. using the Build Project option), everything is ok - it correctly picks foo.exe from the location it was built to on the previous, failed, build. This makes me think that the path, at least, must be ok.
Can anyone suggest why the executable cannot be ran as part of the rebuild? Is it a timing issue, e.g. Project B commences before foo.exe is known to the file system??
It all works under Visual Studio's regular (re)build. It's just the Incredibuild rebuild which fails. Note that I'm doing all of this through the Visual Studio IDE, not from a command line.
Edit: this is the freebie version of Incredibuild that I'm using (the one which comes with Visual Studio), so all of the build is on the local machine.
I contacted the Xoreax technical support about this in the end and they told me that this is a "rare but known issue that is related to one of our extra accelerating features".
Their first suggestion was writing an executable which simply sleeps "for a few milliseconds" and having that run as part of the custom build tool post-link. This did indeed solve the immediate problem, but the solution I'm building has numerous similar problems and adding this delay in everywhere quickly became tedious and didn't always work. It felt like a fudge anyhow.
So I asked if this behaviour can be toggled to off, and indeed it can. In Visual Studio the Incredibuild menu has an Agent Settings option, and from the invoked dialog's Visual Studio Builds|Advanced page it's a simple case of unchecking the Enhance throughput using out-of-order tasks spawning option.
Case closed.
There are options how to offload or intercept custom tools during your build process. Try to look onto "c:\program files (x86)\IncrediBuild\Samples"
I am using a variation of Jeff Atwood’s Unhandled Exception handler it steps in when there is an Unhandled Exception in the application. It then logs the error, generates a screen shot and notifies the user.
When compiled in a solution the project generates an EXE that is called when needed. In updating the program I am using Visual Studio 13 to edit the existing settings items in the project properties. In the code I use commands such as this from ConfigurationManager.
string appProduct = unhandledExceptions.Properties.Settings.Default.AppProduct;
I was happy to see that it worked and reflected the changes I made in the IDE. However I couldn’t find the settings in the solutions generated confg file (MyApplication.exe.config). I assumed it was reaching back to the other project folder for the UnhandledExceptions.exe.config.
I created an installer and installed it to a virtual machine. My settings carried over, but again I could not see a config file.
It turns out the values are embedded in the executable UnhandledException.exe.
The project does not have any resources listed. Searching the web and StackOverflow looking a questions that want to do this, and there are a lot of them, it seems this was generally considered not possible and not desirable. Questions usually end in “You don’t want to do that, it’s called config for a reason”.
I may want to turn this off, so it is editable externally. The properties of app.config in both projects are identical.
What setting is making this possible after all? Is it a new capability with Visual Studio 2013?
There is no Visual Studio setting required. If you don’t want the user to have access to the configuration file, don’t include it in the distribution. One can always be added if the settings names are known.
In the description below application generically represents the name of the application being used.
I’ve found through observation some interesting things about the way ConfigurationManager works.
For User settings it will look in the following places in order of priority:
user.config for the application in the user’s AppData area
application.exe.config in the program folder
application.exe itself
Each setting is searched for individually. If your application requests a setting that is not found in either user.config or the application.exe.config it will get it from the executable.
For Application settings it looks in the following places in order of priority:
application.exe.config in the program folder
application.exe itself.
There is no equivalent to user.config for application settings.
Opening the application.exe in the Visual Studio IDE does not reveal a resource for the configuration information.
application.exe.config is handy because it can be modified externally and used as a default value for new installations. Once a setting is overridden in the user.config the value in application.exe.config is ignored.
The same is not true for the AppSettings section, the older configuration method from .Net 1.0. If I delete the configuration file it does not have them in the executable.
These observations were made with Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 and tested in Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. I suspect they are true in all versions.
I would like to setup an automatic software distribution process, preferably from Microsoft Visual Studio, which builds my projects in all the different configurations and platforms, and packages all the created objects in a predefined folder tree structure.
The software distribution packages would be for Windows libraries and WDM driver projects written in C/C++. Each library has several different configurations (i.e. Windows 7 Release, Windows XP Release, MT/MD runtime compilation flags) for different platforms (i.e. x86 and x64). A similar thing is with the drivers. Without any automatic process to create a software distribution package, it's necessary to build all the different configurations for each platform and then copy the created objects to a predefined folder structure and then zip the created folder giving it a release name and version. This process is quite time consuming and error prone. Therefore, my goal is to automate this process using a clean a nice solution.
I've been researching about this for a few weeks already and have actually implemented a few different solutions. However non of the solutions I implemented until now is flawless whatsoever. Hence since this should be a problem that I guess many developers have already encountered, I would like to hear different opinions on what would be a nice and efficient way to do it.
Up until now I've tried the following:
A batch script and a Makefile to be used by NMAKE. This is not so good because it makes difficult to set the same build parameters that are set on the visual studio project.
Implemented a "deploy" target task (editing the .vcsproj files) which calls MSBuild of the project for each configuration/platform and copies the generated files to a distribution directory. This has the advantage that I can start the deploy activity from within visual studio but it also produces several environment variables problems, specially when building windows drivers.
Any ideas or suggested solutions will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Zion
If you haven't already, add a post-build step for each lib and driver which copies the built files into your specific tree and also zips them.
If you haven't already, create one Visual Studio solution (.sln file) which builds all these projects at once.
If you haven't already, set up Build configuration using the Build | Configuration Manager dialog. Now from the IDE, you should be able to specify a specific configuration and do a Build | Rebuild Solution and make sure all the projects are successfully built.
From the command-line, you can now automate #3 by opening a Visual Studio command line prompt (which sets up the environment variables appropriately). Start devenv.exe with appropriate command-line parameters.