Releasing FTN95 .NET executables and DLLs

In order to use an FTN95 .NET executable or DLL on another machine the following components must be installed:

• The .NET Framework must be installed.
• salflibc.dll must be installed either on the PATH or in the application directory.
• The FTN95 .NET runtime library must be installed. The use of a Windows Installer and installation to the Global Assembly Cache is recommended. All four files listed below must be present.
• Your FTN95 .NET executable/DLL must be installed.

The .NET framework can be downloaded to the target machine from the Microsoft website or it can be included with your release (there is a redistributable framework installer available from Microsoft). The framework version number must be the same as or greater than that used for developing the release.

A copy of salflibc.dll must be shipped when using the current release of FTN95 .NET (a future release of FTN95 .NET will not require this DLL for .NET). salflibc.dll should be installed either on the PATH, or in the same directory as the executable/DLL. If there is more than one copy of salflibc.dll on the target machine, care should be taken to ensure that the appropriate version is used. The safest method is to install this DLL in the same directory as the executable/DLL.

A set of FTN95 .NET runtime libraries is also required. This set is installed on the developer machine as part of the FTN95 .NET installation and is placed in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC). Another copy of the set of library files will be found in the "Redist" sub folder for easy access when releasing your product. This set consists of three files:

ftn95lib.dll
ftn95lib.mdl
ftn95lib1.mdl

These files must be installed on the target machine.

There are two standard procedures for installing Silverfrost redistributable files.

a) All redistributable files can be placed in the application folder.

b) The three .NET runtime files above can be placed in the GAC and salflibc.dll placed on the path (c:\WINDOWS\System32\ is recommended). If the .NET runtime files are installed into the GAC then it is not enough to have salflibc.dll in the application folder. Installation into the GAC can be achieved by using the Windows Installer, available with Visual Studio .NET Professional, or by using a modern third party installer product. Alternatively the .NET Framework SDK utility called gacutil.exe can be used for this purpose.

When using the Visual Studio Windows Installer, the File System view should be selected. A special folder is added by right clicking on the File System on Target Machine node, one of these being the Global Assembly Cache Folder....

The above set of library files should be added to this folder (see the Windows Installer documentation for further information).