Hey all I need my artists to be able to run the debug version of my Visual Studio app for various reasons. Some of them are missing the required .dlls, and can only run the Release builds. Is there some easy way to get the .dlls they need to run the debug builds installed on their machines? thanks programmer_tom

They should install Visual Studio or whatever development environment you're using.

But they also shouldn't need to run Debug builds. Why do you think they do? You can almost certainly enable the features you believe you need the artists to have (asserts? debug-only warnings? what?) without actually linking against the debug runtimes.

Explain why you need the artists to have access to debug builds and we'll tell you the correct way to do it.

"various reasons" =

In my engine, i launch a thread to watch for resources being updated, and I also enable drag an drop etc. etc., but i only want to do this for debug builds.


some machines have those debug .dlls already (most of them). Why is this so hard?

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In my engine, i launch a thread to watch for resources being updated, and I also enable drag an drop etc. etc., but i only want to do this for debug builds.

What you need to do is create a new configuration for you project, in addition to the built-in Debug and Release ones. Call it "Artist" or something.

You can either base the Artist build off the Debug configuration (and then change the link options to link against release libraries), or base it off the Release build and include an additional #define (ENABLE_ARTIST_FEATURES or something) that you gate this code off of. You can then also add ENABLE_ARTIST_FEATURES to the list of additional symbols to define in your Debug configuration. Then, you surround the code you want to be enabled in debug/artist builds with

#ifdef ENABLE_ARTIST_FEATURES   ...code...#endif

This is a far more scalable, powerful and flexible method of doing this.

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some machines have those debug .dlls already (most of them). Why is this so hard?

They're installed by installing Visual Studio or various SDKs. You are not legally allowed to redistribute them directly yourself, however. So your only options are to install VS or do what I describe above.

Quote:Original post by programmer_tom
In my engine, i launch a thread to watch for resources being updated, and I also enable drag an drop etc. etc., but i only want to do this for debug builds.

You can handle this with #ifdefs on a release build so that you dont link against the offending libraries.

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Otherwise, you may have to bundle the required dlls with the application yourself.

You aren't allowed, last I checked.

Quote:Original post by jpetrie

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Otherwise, you may have to bundle the required dlls with the application yourself.

You aren't allowed, last I checked.

My bad, changed the comment so not to promote distribution :)