[Elecraft] K3 Cool version 6 - posted.

[David Woolley (E.L)]

ab2tc wrote:
> I have tried to install this program, but it appears that unless one has VB
> installed, one is out of luck. The first complaint was the missing
> vbrun300.dll. I located this on the web and installed it the folder I tried

Note, if it is legal to download this from the web, in isolation, at 
all, the only place to download it from will be Microsoft themselves. 
Conversely, if you can't download it from Microsoft, it is almost 
certainly an illegal copy.

> to install Cool from. Rerunning the setup, it's missing another dll file; I
> forget the name. I suspect I could go on like this until I had found and
> installed all files needed by the VB runtime system. Is there perhaps a
> compiler switch or something that could be changed so that it would produce
> an executable that is not dependent on other files? It does look a very nice
> program to try out.

Basically, no. Unless he rewrote it in C, using only basic Windows API
capabilities, which would be a major job (many times the job of writing
it originally) it is always going to require additional DLLs if it is to
run on a wide range of versions of Windows. (He is actually writing
using tools that haven't been supported by Microsoft for some years, but
that does make it more likely to work on versions of Windows that are
likely to still be in use but themselves haven't been supported for years.)

Normally the development tools contain some files which are termed
redistributables. These can be redistributed, free of charge, as long as
they are included as part of a program that needs them, and the licence
for that program gives adequate protection (e.g. not allowing them to be
further redistributed, without the program, or to be reverse engineered).

Assuming that he only used redistributable DLLs, he should have included
those used in the setup package. A caveat, though, this age of tooling
was particularly prone to a problem known as "DLL Hell" (Google it),
which relates to having conflicting version requirements for DLLs, or
different versions installed in different places.

A commercial developer, writing a Windows only GUI program, these days, 
would probably use .NET.  The DLLs needed for that should already be 
installed on Vista, and are, I think, installed on XP.  A commercial 
developer simply wouldn't support 98 or ME, but to run the program on 
those, you would need to either include .NET framework redistributables, 
or the end user would need to install the full framework.

(.NET programs tend to perform poorly on older machines and access to 
lower level functions, and other more technical features, often involves 
third party code (which would need its own redistributables to be 
supplied) or coding some parts against low level Windows interfaces, 
which requires a technically skilled programmer.

Where I work, we have to use third party code just to access serial 
ports, although I think that might be because we need more than two 
ports - although serial ports seem to be considered obsolete by 
Microsoft, and the lowest levels of abstraction they really want to 
support, for normal programmers, is a TCP connection, although they 
might prefer it to be the .NET remote procedure call level)


-- 
David Woolley
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