Are Visual Basic install problems common?

[Dan Kegel]

On 10/20/05, Michael Stefaniuc <mstefani at redhat.com> wrote:
> Dan Kegel wrote:
> > Is it common for Visual Basic applications to
> > have problems installing under Wine?
> I'm not sure about this. The question is: are there some common
> installers that are used in VB applications? Or is everybody point and
> clicking his own installer?

One common flavor of installer is the one that Microsoft shipped
with VB studio; it's the kind of installer that one uses when
the software to install is unpacked already on a LAN, so the
installer just needs to copy files to the local machine.
Other than that, I think the installers are probably the same
as for C++ apps.

> The installers of the most VB applications i have played with installed
> fine. One failed though due to bugs in VarCmp() and i think it was
> VarDiv(). I have quick fixes for those bugs in my tree but have no time
> at the moment to do the correct fixes with test cases and submit them.

Can you submit the rough patch as a work-in-progress?

> > Maybe there are hundreds of thousands of  businesses and
> > government offices that have large
> > collections of VB apps written in-house ...
> > they take one look at the trouble they
> > have installing, and give up.
> Are there any numbers to back this affirmation? My experience with the
> couple of small VB applications i tried is that the installer worked
> better than the program afterwards.

Here's what I know: the city governments of Munich, Mannheim,
and one in Brazil say they have a subtantial number of VB applications,
but they have not said that any of them install properly under Wine.
I'm starting to focus now on this kind of application so I
can understand the problem better.  My first app is Church Windows;
it's difficult to install because it assumes you have MFC40, MFC42,
and the VB Runtime already installed, because it checks the IE6 version,
*and* because it installs fonts that confuse Wine.
Once you get past all that, it fails on startup with an "automation error" --
this is probably one of the low-hanging fruit you mentioned.

> I have to agree that a good support for VB would be good for the
> adoption of Wine as VB seems to be the shell/awk/perl/whatever scripts
> of Windows users.

Indeed.

> > Does anyone have experience rolling VB (not VB.net) apps
> Not me as i do not need Wine; i mean besides having fun hacking on it.
> And oleaut32 (used extensively by VB apps) has a lot of low hanging
> fruits aka missing features/bugs; to bad i do not have much time for
> Wine lately.