Re: Standalone VB exe


"Mike Williams" <gagamomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:uqYkggu3IHA.2348@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Hi all. I have written a fairly large VB program and I would like it to be
able to run as a "stand alone" exe, or at least as "stand alone" as you
can
get with VB6. I do realise that the VB6 runtime itself will be required,
but
knowing that the runtime is present by default on almost all systems I
wrote
the program in such a way that it requires nothing other than the VB6
runtime itself to be installed on the machine on which it is run. To that
end I ensured that my program does not use any third party or external
libraries or components and so that it uses nothing other than the
standard
controls that are built into the VB runtime (in other words, it does not
use
things like the CommonDialog Control or the RichTextBox control or
anything
like that).

However, I've just used the VB Package and Deployment Wizard to create a
standard Dependency File and it tells me that my program requires a
library
called MSSTDFMT.DLL, which appears to be the Microsoft Standard Data
Formatting Object library. I have no idea where that came from, or why my
program requires it. The exe does run fine as a "stand alone exe" on all
machines on which I've tried it (Vista, various XP machines etc) with just
the .exe file installed, so presumably the DLL must already be installed
on
those systems. But why does my own VB6 program need it? If I create a
standard VB6 project with just a few bits of code and create a Dependency
File for it I do not need the MSSTDFMT.DLL, even if I use various "Format"
lines in my code, so why does my large VB program require it? What am I
likely to have done in my code that causes such a requirement?

Mike


ADO, Grids, etc. use it. And I vaguely remember where some control's
"design-time" needed some component, but not it's 'runtime'. Thus the 'VB
Project' had a dependency but the compiled product did not. Don't know if
that has anything to do with msStdFmt and your situation, but it might help
explain some of the mystery.

You can find various tools here to help uncover exactly who/what is using
it.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx

Personally, I never spent much time worrying about a completely
"free-standing" VB application. Too many components/objects/thingies in
Windows depend on dynamic-linked libs, and VB can't use or create static
ones, so at some point you end-up swimming up stream for little profit. <g>

I would just remove the component from the P&D package. Every Windows system
is likely to have msStdFmt.dll already (though sometimes it isn't properly
registered).

hth
-ralph


.

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