Saturday, April 25, 2009

Environment issues detector


Do you remember the Bug Reporter Application?

It was extended to check right now the runtime of NaroCAD is good or not.

NaroCAD have mostly three problems which are related to not be able to start:
- it does not have .Net 3.5 (SP1) installed. This is rarely happen as who read on blog or look on source code see that is related with .NET or with C# have already installed. If you use Windows 7 Beta, you will have it also installed. So no problems so far.
- it does not download OpenCascade, the 3D CAD framework written in C++ that is used for modelling and visualization by NaroCAD. NaroCAD is built on top of OpenCascade.
- it does not have Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Runtime SP1 on your machine.

Using the Microsoft way about how to detect if Visual C++ Runtime is or is not installed seems to fail at least on my machine. So I check that either the MS way to verify the runtime. If it fails, it tries back to check a Visual C++ Express install (that installs by itself the Runtime without reporting as such). Also, you can run NaroCAD by copying all OpenCascade dlls without installing it, which brings that NaroCAD will fail to detect the OpenCascade installation.

Because this detection appears to not be infallible in real life (does anyone have another solutions?) you will have an ignore button. You will also have a checkbox that say: "Don't show next time this dialog" but users will do it by themselves. (doesn't appear in the screenshot but it will exist in the end)

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