I am trying to add some external DLLs to the Acumatica Customisation project but upon publishing it results in "System.BadImageFormatException: Format of the executable (.exe) or library (.dll) is invalid."
Error Image:
I already have added multiple DLLs to the Customisation. And was using the method specified here: Acumatica unable to publish the Customization Package to skip over the errors, but in this case it does not seem to be working.
The first step should be identifying which DLL is the culprit. I suggest you create an empty project and put the files in there one by one with the ignore rules. Maybe you missed to add ignore rule for one of the files.
This error happens because Acumatica attempts to parse the DLL as a .Net framework assembly. If you add non .Net assembly such as native x86/x64 compiled libraries you need to add the ignore rule so Acumatica doesn't attempt to parse it.
If the error is coming from a DLL you compiled, make sure it was compiled in Any CPU platform. This prevents any incompatibility related to 32 bit/64 bit mismatch.
I need to write a program that uses some COM objects, accessed from the python comtypes package. I use the clsid and/or progid to create and use them. These objects are provided by a third party, and normally they are installed with a normal installer (setup.exe or MSI file).
Let's suppose that these DLL files have a license that allows me to ship them together with my program. Is it possible to load these DLL files into memory, and use them from a portable app without actually registering them? Or alternatively, can I register them from my program?
A related question is this: how to determine the chain of DLL files that are needed to create a given COM object? (Other than trial and error.)
Background: in reality, there are multiple libs and the main problem is that I do not want the users to run 4 different installers before they can start the actual program. That would be too difficult for an average user.
You're asking a lot of questions here. There are a lot of ways to accomplish what you're trying to accomplish, and it's hard to answer such a broad set of questions. If you have specific questions on how to do a specific thing, please start new posts for those.
That said, I will try to give you some information to help you figure out what you need/want to do.
Can you use a COM DLL without registering it?
Yes. There are several ways, depending on the needs of the COM DLL and the platform you're using. However, some options won't always work, and other options are very challenging.
DllGetClassObject - In some cases, depending on the COM object you're trying to load, you can just load the DLL, call the DllGetClassObject function directly, and use the returned IClassFactory to create your object. This is the easiest way -- if it works. If the class you create requires that the DLL be registered (maybe it does a CoCreateInstance internally, or maybe it needs proxy support), this won't work for you. To determine if this will work, it's either trial-and-error, or you have to ask the developer of the COM DLL.
Registration-free COM - This is how it's done in .NET. I'm not sure if you can do anything like this easily in Python.
CoRegisterClassObject - If you are going to create your own registration-free COM implementation, this function is going to be critical. I believe this is a fundamental implementation detail for Microsoft's registration-free COM. However, be aware that this would be a very challenging thing to do, and it would require a very good understanding of COM.
Can you register a COM DLL from your program?
Yes. There are a few ways. However, you are likely to run into security issues here -- typically, COM components register themselves in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, and you typically need admin rights to write here. Some COM components/installers are designed to register themselves in HKEY_CURRENT_USER, which would get around the security thing. However, you may have no control over where a component registers itself, and even if you do, registering in HKEY_CURRENT_USER isn't a perfect solution.
regsvr32.exe - One option is to programmatically invoke regsvr32.exe on the DLL.
DllRegisterServer or DllInstall - If a COM DLL can be registered with regsvr32.exe, then it has at least one of these functions exported. You can load the DLL manually and call these functions just like regsvr32.exe does. DllInstall is less common than DllRegisterServer. If DllInstall is present, it may give you the option of installing in HKEY_CURRENT_USER. If not, you have to just do whatever DllRegisterServer does, since there are no options you can provide to that function.
Write the registry values yourself -- If you can figure out all the registry settings that are needed, there's nothing stopping you from putting them into the registry manually. This would get around the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/HKEY_CURRENT_USER issue -- you can write them wherever you like (but HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE still probably requires admin rights).
regedit.exe - Another way to write the registry values yourself is to store them in a .reg file and call regedit.exe to merge them.
How do you determine dependencies of a DLL?
Ideally, the developer of that DLL knows and can tell you. That's the only way that's truly fool-proof.
For COM dependencies, it may be impossible to figure this out any other way than asking the developer or trial-and-error. This is because a COM dependency may exist simply because some code in the DLL just calls CoCreateInstance to create some third-party COM object, and since this is something that is only expressed in source code, there is no metadata on the DLL that will help you find these dependencies.
The above is also true for any dynamically-loaded dependencies. For example, if some code just calls LoadLibrary directly, there is no way for you to determine the dependency from the outside.
For statically-loaded dependencies, you can use tools like Dependency Walker. Note that a lot of the dependencies you will see are system dependencies -- you don't want to include, for example, user32.dll and kernel32.dll because these are installed with Windows.
How do you install third-party dependencies?
If you know exactly what files to write, where to write them and what registry settings (etc) need to be applied, you can do all of that yourself. For some dependencies, it can be easier to just include the third-party installer in your installer and just execute it silently. Many installers support a silent mode for just this reason. A good example of this is the Visual C++ runtime (msvcrt*.dll) -- many applications need this dependency, and many installers just include Microsoft's installer as a part of their distribution, and the primary installer just calls the secondary installers silently.
I am planning to create a Licensing Module which can be commonly used for all Desktop Applications. So i thought of making it so simple without any or less coding in the existing applications which are going to be activated by this Licensing Module.
So is there any way where if the user passes the exe location, the system should capture the exe available in the particular location, and the system should get all the windows forms available inside that exe?
Am not sure whether it is possible or not but i need to know whether there is any way to do it. It would be helpful for me to develop this with less complications.
You can read the actual executable image data from its path and in case, its a managed (.NET) executable, you can use the metadata to do some analysis. In this case, you can browse through all types within the executable assembly (and perhaps other assemblies from the same directory) and find out the number of classes/types that are inherited from System.Windows.Forms.Form.
However, considering that these applications are probably in your control, the saner approach would be have an public API in these executable that will provide you the relevant information.
Guys i found a solution for this....i used the following method...
Assembly SampleAssembly = Assembly.LoadFrom("Assembly path here");
// Display all the types contained in the specified assembly.
foreach (Type oType in SampleAssembly.GetTypes())
{
Console.WriteLine(oType.Name);
}
this worked perfectly for me....
VinayC thanks for your support buddy...really appreciate it....:)
I use third party static library (provided as a .LIB file without source code) in my project. For linking purposes it is enough to add it via "Properties/Linker/Input->Additional Dependencies"
This library is not used in any other project in the solution.
I wonder if I should add it as an item to project file itself. The advantages that I see: it will be immediately obvious that this project uses it and one wouldn't have to add it to version control system manually (anything that is a part of the project/solution is added automatically if you use something like AnkSVN).
The project in VCS must be buildable. It is impossible without the lib. So you should add it.
I'm working on a bunch of solutions which uses a third party DLL from vendors like Telerik. We use the dll in most of your solutions. But when i uninstall any of the solutions the dll is getting removed from the assembly. This is a very unfortunate behavior.
I guess even putting the dll in the bin folder wont help it. Because i can use multiple solutions in a same web application. In that case if i remove on solution it is removing the dll from bin folder too.
What is the workaround for this ugly issue?
This is indeed painful. You could consider merging 3rd party DLLs in using ilmerge. Additional approaches can be found in Muhimbi's free SharePoint Coding Guidelines (Chapters 8 and 9)
One option is not to include the third party DLLs in your individual solutions. Anything that gets installed with a solution will be removed when you uninstall that solution. You can have a 'framework' solution that installs common DLLs. This way, those common DLLs are only removed if you remove your framework solution. Or you could have a single solution installer for each shared DLL if you want more fine-grained control over them.
See also the question on SharePoint.SE: Multiple solutions using shared dlls can cause havoc when individual solutions are retracted