DLL Hell

[Karma]

Hi,

I'm slowly being driven insane by dll's. I have included a number of references in my app that i am trying to distribute to another test machine. A few of these are SQLServer dll's that allow access to use DTS packages stored on the server. These are found in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn\. I believe they are put there when you install Enterprise Manager. There are a few more that sit in C:\windows\system32. Currently there's 4 dll's not normally found on a vanilla machine with just office installed on it.

This db will end up on 100+ pc when it's finished and i don't have the time or patience to manually register them all on each machine + there's likely to be a few more before it's finished.

Ideally i'm looking for a simple package wizard to do the job but i can't find anything suitable. The package wizard in office developer extensions for 2003 doesn't seem to support registration of dll's within specific folders i.e. they are all unpackaged in the same folder as the db, not where the db will expect to find them. Other alternatives such as Inno setup use scripting in what i think is Pascal that goes beyond my understanding of the language and what it's trying to do.

Does anyone know of an installer that would do this job. Ideally it would simply ask for the path of the current dll, bundle it with the installation and then unpackage it and register it at the other end

Thanks

K.

 

[boblarson]

Sorry I can't answer the question about an installation program that will do what you want, but I did want to chime in about the dll's. Make sure that the dll's that you want to distribute, can in fact be redistributed. Microsoft prohibits redistribution of some of the SQL dll's (SQLDMO.dll is one of them I believe).

 

[Karma]

Sorry I can't answer the question about an installation program that will do what you want, but I did want to chime in about the dll's. Make sure that the dll's that you want to distribute, can in fact be redistributed. Microsoft prohibits redistribution of some of the SQL dll's (SQLDMO.dll is one of them I believe).

Well funny you should say that, i manually registered the dts dll and now rather than getting a broken reference error i get an invalid class string error . This really blows goats. Distributing a database really shouldn't be this much of a pain. The db is really just a reporting tool and i'm beinging to think that Access is going to get binned in favour of SQLServer reporting services