I agree that this was poorly implemented. It might help to understand that the concept of
WinSxS and manifests, as well as the unhelpful messages displayed, were all inventions of the
Windows OS development group. The VC++ libraries group learned of this and decided it would be a
good idea to try to leverage the new (as of Win XP) concept. Unfortunately, coordination between
In article <h8a125p2nhgaj1r335d3odbqpjj2m32pl7@4ax.com>,
Tim Roberts <timr@probo.com> wrote:
If Microsoft then publishes a fix for any of the CRT functions you used,
you must rebuild and redistribute your executable.
Although this is true, it is worth pointing out that this is extremely
rare, and gets more rare as time goes on. I can only recall this happening
once in the last 12 years (for the April 2001 time bug).
I think the gdiplus exploits -- where dozens of apps had its own
version of that DLL -- might have been an impetus for wanting the
ability to patch MS-supplied DLLs on people's machines. See this for
info: http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/security/Content/11173.html
But, as I said earlier this thread, if MS wanted the ability to
quickly and easily patch up DLLs they supply, then they should have
made using manifests and the like MUCH easier to do. Instead, they
made manifests a royal pain to use, and static linking pretty easy.
With the half-baked -- useless, really -- error messages given to the
users, I really think that the implementation of manifests needed
someone to say "nice idea. Now go back and do it right this time."
Nathan Mates
--
<*> Nathan Mates - personal webpage http://www.visi.com/~nathan/
# Programmer at Pandemic Studios -- http://www.pandemicstudios.com/
# NOT speaking for Pandemic Studios. "Care not what the neighbors
# think. What are the facts, and to how many decimal places?" -R.A. Heinlein