This may be a stupid question, but here it goes anyway.

I am building a .net windows forms program that needs input from a joystick. I added a reference to the DirectInput dll on my dev machine and the joystick works perfect. When I tried to move my program (and the directx dlls) to my target machine I get errors and a crash because it cant find the assemblies/methods that the joystick uses (immediately after I execute the method that enables the joystick input).

After some googling I determined that maybe I needed to build against Slimdx or SharpDX and distribute whichever one to my target system. But now I am wondering: is this really neccessary? Can I just install the DirectX redistributable and be done with it? What does SharpDX give me that I can't get from using directx ...directly ?

fyi

On my dev machine I added a reference to the DirectInput dll that lives inside a subfolder in the Windows folder. I naively thought I could just copy that dll with my exe and have it work. My dev machine is Win7 and target machine is Server2003.

Thanks for any tips or advice.

p.s. - I post this here because apparently the SharpDX forums are closed.

Why don't you use Winapi? Do you really need DirectInput or XInput? Winapi provides a lot of joystick functionality.

Look for joySetCapture in winmm.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd757114(v=vs.85).aspx

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/e7163456-b3bb-4ea2-8025-bda8072f5246/what-is-the-best-way-to-use-joystick-in-c

http://www.codingmonkeys.com/index.php?topic=1183.0

You don't need SlimDX or SharpDX to do this; you could just do what they do yourself (essentially p/invoke the appropriate functionality). But they'll make it easier for you.

You probably can't just redistribute the DirectInput.dlls though, since that's usually illegal. That's why MS provides the DirectX redistributables; you'll have to bundle one of those with your installer.

(Check the licensing agreements, it's possible DirectInput's DLLs are redistributable themselves, but I'd err on the side of caution.)