I have written a little basic program in Direct X which I based on example code from www.DirectXTutorial.com. I don't know if anyone is familiar with this tutorial. I have previously done some programming with OpenGL. I got relatively far with that as I completed and assignment using it for one of my University modules on 3D Graphics. I was curious to compare programming between Direct X and OpenGL and see how they differed. I have found that switching between the two is not so difficult. I created a little program which draws a Dodecahedron. I have been trying to show it to my brother-in-law because he is a Maths teacher and I had consulted him on the calulations required to work out the 3D vertex positions in a Dodecahedron (I figured that out myself in the end which I am quite proud of). The problem is that it has ended up being an absolute pain to try and get the program to run on any computer other than the one I developed on. The development computer has the March 2008 version of the Direct X SDK running on it. The Tutorial makes use of an expansion library for Direct X which has meant that the program I created relies on d3dx9_37.dll. I can live with that and that dependency can be satisfied by either putting the dll with the file (dirty approach I know but it works) or by installing the most up to date version of DirectX 9C. I thought that this was all ther was too it. Unfortunately there seems to be some other dependency. Even with the latest version of Direct X installed and even if I put d3dx9_37.dll with the program it still would not work on Windows XP SP3 which I have installed at home. My home system is dual boot with my primary operating system being Windows XP x64 and has Visual Studio installed as well as my other programming tools. I got the program to work on that Operating system when I updated my installed version of Direct X. On regular XP SP3 though I just kept getting an error saying the program could not start because it was not configured correctly. I figured this was most likely some missing library or something but the error message did not provide any enlightening detail. In despairation I installed Vistual C++ express with hopes that the debugger from that might give me a more explicit error as to what is causing the program to be unable to start. This did not work out as I expected. Once Visual C++ 2008 express was installed the program then just started working. The problem is I don't want to have my brother in law have to go to the length of installing Visual Studio Express just to be able to run my little program. I would guess that there is something in Visual Studio which satisfied the dependency to make this program work. The problem is I don't know what. The program is just native Win32 API so I would not expect the presence of .Net to make any difference though I could be wrong. In spite of the initial ease of switching to .Net now seeing the seeming DLL Hell I have to go through just to get a little example program to run I would feel a bit put of using it. After all the OpenGL program I created just worked on whatever computer I ran it on (As long as it was NT based i.e. W2K, XP or Vista) without any extra libraries being needed. I did compile the executable for release in Visual Studio so I would expect that the executable producted should not have been created with Visual Studio dependencies. Those with more DirectX experience would probably have a better idea of DirectX dependencies / prerequisites. Can anyone help?

If it is the VC2008 runtime you're missing, then you'd need that for OpenGL apps too - it's not a DirectX specific thing.

Quote:Original post by Carl Jokl
The Tutorial makes use of an expansion library for Direct X which has meant that the program I created relies on d3dx9_37.dll. I can live with that and that dependency can be satisfied by either putting the dll with the file (dirty approach I know but it works)

So long as you're only distributing the program to people you know. It's against the EULA (illegal?) to package the DLL with your exe, for security reasons. The reason D3DX is a DLL now (A few years ago it was a static .lib), is that if there's ever a security problem found in D3DX, the DLL can be patched through Windows Update. Unfortunately, Windows Update can't check every DLL on the system, so if you have a copy of the DLL in your application's directory, it won't be patched. Furthermore, when your app starts up, this unpatched DLL will be used. That means that even though the user has downloaded the security update, they're not protected.

Thank you. After digging around in Visual Studio's extensive configuration I managed to switch it to use the Multi-threaded (non DLL) option and have built with that instead.

Would it be safe to say this is something which changed between Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008? I ask because I must admit back when I was doing the OpenGL coding I was using Visual Studio 2005 (2008 had not been launched yet).

I will take the produced executable home and try it out. The question will be whether Uninstalling Visual Studio Express will remove it properly to make it behave as it did before and make it like the platform I am trying to have it used on. As regards distributing a DLL, I know it is bad practice but this is only a little example program and if I were to make any proper application in DirectX I would be deploying it in a more professional manner.

Quote:Original post by Carl Jokl
Thank you. After digging around in Visual Studio's extensive configuration I managed to switch it to use the Multi-threaded (non DLL) option and have built with that instead.

Would it be safe to say this is something which changed between Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008? I ask because I must admit back when I was doing the OpenGL coding I was using Visual Studio 2005 (2008 had not been launched yet).

I'd recommend using the DLL version, since it can be patched if needed (via Windows Update again), and it gives you a smaller executable size. I'd just link the user to the VC2008 redistributable.
This has always been the case for VC2005 and VC2008, it's just that it's more likely that another application has installed the VC2005 runtime on the target machine for you, and it Just Works. If you tried your VC2005 app on a clean install of XP, it would probably have the same problem.

Quote:Original post by Carl Jokl
I will take the produced executable home and try it out. The question will be whether Uninstalling Visual Studio Express will remove it properly to make it behave as it did before and make it like the platform I am trying to have it used on.

Uninstalling VC2008 probably won't remove the VC2008 runtimes, since they're a fairly critical component. You can think of it as getting a free update with VC2008's installer.

Thanks. It is worth bearing in mind I suppose.

I haven't got to the point of using installers yet though that said I am not sure how much Native Win32 development I will be doing. Job wise I am a C# .Net developer. Hobby wise I use mainly Java. I started looking into DirectX because I was on a project doing some development for a Pocket PC and noticed that the .Net Compact Framework included some packages for using .Net. I thought it might be interesting to see what can be done with DirectX on a PDA but I can visualise my PDA screaming in pain not being designed for 3D graphics. It seems that the decent mobile graphics processors seem to be appearing faster in Phones than PDAs. Meanwhile I have moved on to a completely different project at work anyway and so it might be a while before I am back developing for the Pocket PC again.