[Ecls-list] deploying ECL built using VC8 on Windows

[Dean O'Connor]

Just a heads up for Windows users.

If you deploy ECL built with VC8 onto a PC without VC8 environment (eg. 
VS2005) installed, you may run issues as we did with ECL and our own C++ 
applications.

ECL seems to be built using /MD flag to use the VC runtime DLL's and the 
ecl.exe.manifest file is supposed to aid VC8 DLL detection (or whatever :)

We have found on a number of PC's simply having the VC8 DLL's in system 
folders was still causing problems.
Manifest seems to sort it out sometimes, but just now for ECL it did not 
help.
The application won't start and you get some kind of config error and 
Windows tells you to try reinstalling.
It seemed a bit random but the following approach sorted it.

So we found the "proper" method of VC8 runtime deployment using 
build-your-own MSI installers.
This method worked flawlessly for us and we didn't need a manifest I think.

The first comment of this link, provides the exact steps to create these 
MSI installers.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zebw5zk9(VS.80).aspx

I tried building ECL with /MT flag to statically link in VC8 runtime, 
but get piles of compile errors.

cheers
deano