Windows – a Windows command-line EXE’s “side-by-side configuration” and how to correct it

configurationdllside-by-sidewindows

I have a simple .exe written in C++ (built with Visual Studio 2005) that tests some hardware using a supplied API. It works fine on the Windows 7 machine I built it on, but when I copy it to another (Windows 7) machine and run it (from the command-line) I get:

The application has failed to start
because its side-by-side configuration
is incorrect. Please see the
application event log or use the
command-line sxstrace.exe tool for
more detail.

What is "side-by-side configuration"?

I ran sxstrace.exe and read the usage info. It appears I would need to instrument my exe to generate a log file for sxstrace.exe to be useful?

I imagine the problem is my exe requires DLLs that either don't exist on the other machine, or are the wrong version. How do I find out what DLLs my exe uses, and what versions it links to on my machine (where it works)? Any other advice on copying it to another machine and getting it running? Would more information help?

Best Answer

mfawzymkh's answer to the "application has failed to start because the side by side configauration is incorrect" question (linked to in the question spirulence linked to in his answer to this question) appears to apply to this question also. mfawzymkh writes:

You can resolve this issue by either one of these 1- Install VC8 Debug CRT 2- Build you app as statically linked

And mfawzymkh's comment on that same answer explains how to build as statically linked:

when you build it in VS, go to projects->settings->C/C++->Code Generation and choose Runtime Lib options to be /MTd instead of /MDd

I did that and the side-by-side configuration message is gone. (And after installing something else for the DLL I was using, my EXE works.)

Related Solutions

Windows – How to you find and replace text in a file using the Windows command-line environment

A lot of the answers here helped point me in the right direction, however none were suitable for me, so I am posting my solution.

I have Windows 7, which comes with PowerShell built-in. Here is the script I used to find/replace all instances of text in a file:

powershell -Command "(gc myFile.txt) -replace 'foo', 'bar' | Out-File -encoding ASCII myFile.txt"

To explain it:

powershell starts up powershell.exe, which is included in Windows 7
-Command "... " is a command line arg for powershell.exe containing the command to run
(gc myFile.txt) reads the content of myFile.txt (gc is short for the Get-Content command)
-replace 'foo', 'bar' simply runs the replace command to replace foo with bar
| Out-File myFile.txt pipes the output to the file myFile.txt
-encoding ASCII prevents transcribing the output file to unicode, as the comments point out

Powershell.exe should be part of your PATH statement already, but if not you can add it. The location of it on my machine is C:\WINDOWS\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0

Update
Apparently modern windows systems have PowerShell built in allowing you to access this directly using

(Get-Content myFile.txt) -replace 'foo', 'bar' | Out-File -encoding ASCII myFile.txt

Windows – n equivalent of ‘which’ on the Windows command line?

Windows Server 2003 and later (i.e. anything after Windows XP 32 bit) provide the where.exe program which does some of what which does, though it matches all types of files, not just executable commands. (It does not match built-in shell commands like cd.) It will even accept wildcards, so where nt* finds all files in your %PATH% and current directory whose names start with nt.

Try where /? for help.

Note that Windows PowerShell defines where as an alias for the Where-Object cmdlet, so if you want where.exe, you need to type the full name instead of omitting the .exe extension.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows – How to you find and replace text in a file using the Windows command-line environment

Windows – n equivalent of ‘which’ on the Windows command line?

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