VB .NET 2008 Embedded Libraries

[bobsklarservices]

I am developing an application that I wish to be portable, so that it can be run from a single executable binary. However, I use a number of libraries, and I have tried relentlessly to search Google for a way to embed them into my compiled binary. I can find nothing, and I suspect the gurus here have a better idea of how to do this. If anyone has any suggestions, please say so, and I thank you in advance for your assistance. If you need any more information, please let me know. I am working mostly in VB .NET 2008 using the .NET Framework 3.5.

[Geek-9pm]

Reading lour post I nan still confused. You use the term embedded to mean a singled binary file. Is that right?

For years the Visual Basic deployment would consist of two parts. One is the code created directly from the stuff you write. The other a library of things that are needed to make the program run. Early versions of Visual Basic had a way of putting it all into one package.

To my limited knowledge, the .NET programming platform does not had this kind of option.   Even if the whole thing is put into one big clump of stuff, after installation it is individual,  separate blocks of things. This allows updates to be made to the parts of the library without the need for you to  do your stuff over.

Please explain. Do you really want to write portable code? You may need to use a non-Microsoft development platform. Or use one of thee older, deprecated compilers from Microsoft. Which is not always a bad idea.

[bobsklarservices]

Yes, by embedded I mean a single binary executable. Generally, I would use a zip file and temporarily extract the files on startup but then delete them on shutdown. This could prevent problems for storing user settings, however, and I'm looking for a separate solution there. But I would consider older compilers, if I could find a way to make my code acceptable for them.

[Geek-9pm]

First a reference fer the benefit of others.
Visual Basic
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I trust you already know much of that. I put it here to that others reading this we get the drift of what we are talking about.

Early versions of Microsoft Basic are very different from the current versions of Visual Basic. You could deploy your code to other versions of Windows with almost no issue. However, the free versions presently available are not full development packages,  But he perform very well. They lack some features  needed for commercial deployment. One such feature is to provides a smooth install for the end user.

Are you using a free version of VB 2008, or did you buy the developer version?

What did you find in a Google search?
I used "VB without NET" and got some hist that look intersecting. But I have not tried any of them, so I won't recommend any.

That's about all I know. I gave up on VB6. I needed the money so I sold lit. So now I play with the free version of Visual Studio 2010. Which requires a user to allow the install of the .NET framework  libraries.

[bobsklarservices]

I mostly use Visual Studio 2008 Express, so I have the free version. I will check the Google results for VB without .NET, but I'm most familiar with the .NET platform.

[BC_Programmer]

I mostly use Visual Studio 2008 Express, so I have the free version. I will check the Google results for VB without .NET, but I'm most familiar with the .NET platform.

Visual Basic 6 and earlier are useless now. More importantly, you would have to rewrite the application from the ground up, re-implementing the swathe of missing features of the earlier version, and attempting to do so with incomplete OO features and a haphazard standard library that provides a barely usable collection class, but somehow manages to include a half-dozen financial functions that nobody ever uses.

In this case, you don't want an application that can be "all in one" executable. You want it to be portable. having a portable application does not require the entire thing to all be in an executable. With .NET you can plonk all the required libraries in the same folder. Then the program would run on any system with the appropriate version of the framework installed.

The trouble is of course the CLR. .NET executables are not really windows applications, but rather .NET assemblies that need to be run via the Common Language Runtime. There are two implementations of a run-time: Mono, and of course the Microsoft CLR.

Mono actually includes a tool that sort of does this, mkbundle and mkbundle2 but I'm not sure exactly how wide a scope it is (It places all the required assemblies in a single file, but I'm not sure whether the result includes any run-time).