Running Visual Studio 2005 .exe file on another computer

[sheehan1234]

I’ve seen other forums pertaining to this, but I still can’t get it to work. I have the Qt addin to Visual Studio 2005 and my program works properly on my computer. I want to be able to save my executable to a flash drive and run the program on another computer without Visual Studio or a compiler on it

Thanks

[goetz]

You will have to distribute the Qt libs, possibly some plugins (imageformats, sqldrivers) and the C/C++ runtimes. See the page "Deploying Qt Applications":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/doc/qt-4.7/deployment.html of the Qt documentation. And have a look at the older "threads:"http://developer.qt.nokia.com/search/tag/deployment here on DevNet.

[sheehan1234]

Thanks Volker, I knew I could count on you, does it matter that the second computer I'm trying to run the executable on is an older version of Windows?

[sheehan1234]

Also, how do I know if i need plugins or not?

[goetz]

Regarding MSVS2005, this shouldn't matter. Make sure to include the VS runtimes! To be on the safe side, you can include them twice.

The files are found in

@
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\redist\x86\Microsoft.VC80.CRT
@

Copy all the DLLs in the directory into the directory where your .exe is. Additionally create a directory Microsoft.VC80.CRT in the dir wehre your exe is, and copy the complete contents of the dir mentioned above into that. You will end up with:

@
file myapp.exe
file msvcrt80.dll
file msvcp80.dll
dir Microsoft.VC80.CRT
file msvcrt80.dll
file msvcp80.dell
file some xml files
@

and possibly some more DLLs and/or other files. The plain DLLs are needed for Windows 2000 and other version, which do not use manifests. The subdir is needed for Windows XP and above with manifest support.

EDIT:
If your application runs, but no images are visible, then you're most probably missing an imageformat plugin. PNGs usually run without; GIF, JPEG, TIFF, SVG and ICO usually need their respective plugins.

[sheehan1234]

you're too smart volker.... it worked perfectly, thank you

[goetz]

Thank's for the compliment, but I learned the hard way, having had the exact same problem some years ago. It took me a day or two to find out a decent solution. So it's only fair to share my experiences to save you from the manifest fiasco - the successor of the DLL hell :)