I have an application with two separate installer projects for x86 and x64 platforms. They reference sqlite3.dll and sqlite_x64.dll respectively. The problem is that when I build the x86 setup project, I have to switch the 'Prefer 32 bit' flag on manually for other projects. Isn't there any elegant way of managing this automatically? I found that its possible to remove the flag programmatically using this command:
CorFlags.exe MyApplication.exe /32BITPREF-
but I don't want to write too much of an ugly code. One option would be to pass a parameter to notify the project installer which platform the application is going to set up against and based on it's value run the above command in it's install event. But I hope there's some simpler and 'cleaner' option for achieving this.
Related
I am very new to .Net6 and .Net Core in general. I understand that it is possible to publish a single file executable but I was a bit surprised to see that the executable is over 180MB even though the application is relatively small.
The application is targeted to Windows x64 only and uses Windows Forms. It has a handful of Forms and uses a JSON library and a CLI library.
There are a number of dependencies which were more-or-less added automatically but I don't know if they are all strictly necessary (e.g the ASPNetCore item)
Bearing in mind that I am only targeting Windows and the featureset used is limited, what are the actions I can take to reduce the size of the executable?
Update
I found https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/trimming/trim-self-contained which seems to indicate that 'trimming' of WinForms apps is not (yet) possible.
If you already did not, you may switch deployment mode to Framework-dependent from self-contained in publish profile settings, this will exclude .net runtime and will reduce file size dramatically.
However, excluding .net runtime, diverts from its purpose being single file, as you need to install correct runtime to use application. In my opinion, it is worth to keep single exe file with runtime included.
Use This code into your application.
<_SuppressWinFormsTrimError>true</_SuppressWinFormsTrimError>
I wrote a WPF program using .NET 5, packed it into the MSIX bundle (Release, x86 and x64) as a framework-dependent package. Everything seems fine, but there is one very annoying thing: on the first run the app says ".NET runtime is missing, would you like to install it?”. If you click yes, the download page opens, where the user has to select the needed runtime, download, and install it. Not the best user experience, I'm thinking about how to improve it.
Is there an option to add .net 5 runtimes (x86 or x64 depending on the user system, or maybe both) as a dependency so it installed automatically?
I know I can define dependencies, but how can I find the right name for the needed dependency?
Also, I know it's possible to define custom install action but I haven't tried it yet, because I want to find a simpler solution. Looks like for that option I'll have to create a small app or script that will check if the needed runtime exists and if not - check the platform and ask the user to install the specific version of the runtime. Not the best user experience too.
Of course, I still have an option to go with self-contained, but I don't want to distribute so many megabytes of .net every time, especially given the fact that I expect frequent updates.
Luckily, I got an answer on techcommunity.microsoft.com
Thanks to Matteo Pagani:
if it's an application based on .NET Core / .NET 5 (as I seem to understand from the description), the suggested and best way to distribuite via MSIX is to use the self-deployment approach. Thanks to MSIX features like differential updates and single disk instance, you don't have to worry too much about the increased size, since the runtime will be downloaded only at the first install.
Dependencies are not a good fit because there are no packages for .net 5 yet.
Custom install actions are possible but more complicated, so I decided to go with self-contained.
Currently I installed a Mac pipeline agent without android tools, because I intended to use it for iOS only. My question is how to filter the Xamarin.Form solution not to build Android because it fails on this environment.
I'm wondering if there is a way for exclude the android part in the Build Xamarin azure task. I'm asking a way of doing it through: msbuild /t:restore;build /avoid:Android.csproj;Android.Binding.csproj or something alike...
in VS Mac (should be similar, but possibly with different menu paths, on PC) select Solution --> Options in the Solution Explorer. Under Build/Configurations create a new config (or copy an existing one). Then select Configuration Mappings, select the config you just created, and Disable the projects that you want to exclude.
When setting up your build pipeline you should have to specify which configuration you want to use.
Recently tried the plugin example of Qt.
It didn't work at all and I was confused as to the reason. Then found the solution on one of the forums.
Qt, Application and plugin all three have to be built with the same configuration (Release/Debug)
This works for me as I can build all three in Debug/Release mode. But if I want users to extend my application using plugins I need to provide debug build of my application. (If I provide release build, users will not be able to trouble-shoot the plugin). Qt source is available so it can be built in any mode.
I don't want to provide debug build of my application to users. Is there any work around for this restriction on build mode for plugins?
P.S. I understand users can debug with logging statements, but not sure how many prefer that approach.
This is because Qt has a so called build key which is just a string containing some Qt configuration information, this is documented in the Qt plugin Howto.
So you should just go ahead and provide a debug build of your application for the best results.
You can build debug version (to have compiled in debug configuration) and strip it out of all symbols etc.
In all of my other .net apps my build process (a mixture of nant and custom tasks) automatically updates the [AssemblyVersionAttribute] AssemblyInfo.cs with the current build number before the call to msbuild, stamping in the build number in the version number.
I'm now working on my first BizTalk project and I'd like to do the same thing with the version numbers of the BizTalk assemblies, but I've run into trouble!
First of all the aseembly version numbers are stored in the btproj files, so I did some googling and found www.codeplex.com/biztalk which looked like the answer to my problem, but there is a deeper problem!
I have a project for my schemas and another for my pipelines, the pipelines project references my schemas project as I have a flat file dis/assemblers. The problem comes when I update the version numbers, as updating them even from within visual studio does not update the pipeline components references to the schemas.
So if I update all the version numbers manually in the VS IDE from 1.0.0.0 to 1.1.0.0, the build fails as the pipeline components flat file dis/assemblers still reference the old 1.0.0.0 version of the schemas! They don't automatically update!
Is this really a manual process of updating the version numbers of the BizTalk projects in the property pages, then building the projects and manually updating the references to them in the properties of all the pipeline components that reference them?
This means that I can't have my build process control the build number part of my version numbers!
Or is there a better method of managing the version numbers of the BizTalk assemblies?
I'm sorry to disappoint you but I've been down the exact some road I had to give up. I guess it could be possible to achieve it but it would require a lot of changes to both the binding files and other XML files (as you mentioned and even more if you have published services etc).
Maybe it could be possible to wrap all these necessary changes in a build step (a MSBuild step or similar in other build frameworks) - that would be useful!
Developer- :)
We had the similar problem and we ended up developing a small utility which would change the version number in all the projects i.e. *.csproj (asssemblyinfo.cs), *.btproj accordingly. Apart from this it would open and modify the *.btp files with the new version of schemas. In nutshell, what all you have to do is to configure this utility in your VS.net tools menu and execute it.
I guess its not very difficult to develop such utility in any .net lanagauge.
Caveat: Do not forget to save the files after updates with the same encoding as they were originally.
Cheers!
Gutted, thought that might be the case. Maybe BizTalk 2009 projects will play more nicely when updating references when changing version numbers.
I started to go through and automate it manually, and when I realised what needed to be done, I took a biiig step back when I realised just how many places I'd have to modify to get it working. Thank god for Undo Checkout.
I do have a standard C# class library included in my project (various helper functions), which i am able to update the version number of during my build process, so I'm basically using that one assembly to version the whole application. If anyone wants to know what version is in any environment, check out the version number of that one assembly.
Not ideal, but it's working.
We've done this successfully on our project - I'll see if I can get the developer of the tool to post details...
This problem arises when you perform an integration build to the latest versions of your dependent components as file references (aka schemas here).
Keep in mind that upgrading the assemblyversion must always performed manually, that way you are always in charge of changes to assemblyversions.
A possible solution to solve the buildbreaks issue is to file reference to a specific version of a dependent component build and not to the latest version and use a subst drive and a copy script to get the latest component builds.
For example:
SchemaA, assembly version 1.0.0.0
PipelineA (with pipelinecomponent XMLValidator for example), assembly version 1.0.0.0
PipelineA has a file reference to a subst drive(say R drive, which maps to a workspace D:\MyComponents) and version 1.0.0.0 of SchemaA as follows:
R:\SchemaA\1.0.0.0\SchemaA.dll.
The copy-script copies the buildoutput of SchemaA locally to your R drive.
When schema A updates to version 1.1.0.0 you don't have any issues because you still use version 1.0.0.0 and YOU have the choice to use the 1.1.0.0 version of your schema. When you want to upgrade, you have to alter your copy-script and replace the file reference to R:\SchemaA\1.1.0.0\SchemaA.dll.