Troubleshooting
Contents
Issues Surrounding MSVC 8.0’s “Safe” Libraries
ASL does not support the non-standard “Safe” C and C++ libraries shipping with Visual C++ 8.0. This may result in many spurious warnings from ASL, Boost, and other standards-conforming C and C++ libraries. To suppress these warnings, define the macros
_CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE, and_SCL_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE
The MSVC command-line settings to define these macros is:
\D_CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE \D_SCL_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE
The ASL header file <adobe/config.hpp> includes checks when compiling with MSVC 8.0 to make sure these macros are defined. To disable this check, define the following macro before including <adobe/config.hpp>:
\DADOBE_TEST_MICROSOFT_NO_DEPRECATE=0
Problems Building ASL
On Windows
Building Adobe Begin for Non-Development Machines
When an app is built using a version of MSVC, that version of Microsoft’s Runtimes Libraries must be ‘findable’ by the OS in order to launch the application. Part of Microsoft’s solution to this problem includes the embedding of an application manifest file into the application. On development machines, these files are automatically installed in C:\WINDOWS\system32. The manifest file describes the binary’s dependencies to external DLLs, and the OS reads the file and hunts down the dependencies to load them. In a clean-install XP system, the Runtime Libraries for MSVC 7.0, 7.1, and 8 don’t exist, which will lead ultimately to the failure to launch applications built with these compilers on non-development machines.
Our current workaround to this problem is to not embed the manifest file in the binary directly, but leave it as a sibling to the app. Then the necessary runtime libraries must also be placed as siblings to the app, along with a manifest file describing them to the OS. For some reason both of these steps are required, and then the app will run in a clean XP installation. Note that this bug wasn’t caught for a long time because these runtime libraries were automatically found when smoke testing the apps. (A big thanks goes to Ken Silver for being the first one report Adobe Begin failing to load on his machine, which isn’t set up for development.)