Runtime with Windows 7 - New builds

[TimStone]

I recently started building my program with FWH 22.03, Harbour, and Visual Studio 2022. I had no problems, but when updating my clients, some on Windows 7 were no longer able to run the program. Clicking on the shortcut, or .exe, gave an hourglass for a few seconds, and then nothing.

On WIndows 10 and 11, it works perfectly.

In this case, I am not using an installer. I just provided a new .exe file, overwriting the previous one.

Has anyone else encountered this problem ?

I can go back and do the builds with 2019 VS files, but did find this curious. Since my computers are all Win 11, I had not caught this behavior earlier.

Tim

[Rick Lipkin]

Tim

I am not a MSVC expert and generally you do not need to install the dot net c++ run time .. however you might need the C++ dot net runtime for W7 .. try the link below and see if that clears up the W7 problem ..


Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable latest supported downloads:
Visual Studio 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2022


https://docs.microsoft.com/en-US/cpp/wi ... w=msvc-170

Rick Lipkin

[TimStone]

Rick,

I think it's more likely that Microsoft put in a flag in the new linker to turn off it's ability to run under Windows 7. They have been doing a lot of push recently about how it is no longer supported, etc. so it may be their way of pushing upgrades to the system.

Fortunately I can still do 2019 builds ...

TIm

[rhlawek]

Tim,

I don't actually support any Win7 devices any longer, but I do still have a fair number of XP devices and older WIndows Server devices that are still in my 32 bit mix. I had to deal with a similar situation back in the VS 2017 period to keep being able to build for those devices while also being able to use current versions of MSVC. I can still build with the most current MSVC version with the following values added. I use hbmk2 exclusively for my builds, I simply have these in a file called legacy.hbc which I include in the hbmk2 build files when needed, and even if included it conditionally builds this way only for 32 bit apps.:

libs=legacy_stdio_definitions{msvc}
ldflags=/SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS,5.01{msvc}
cflags=/D_USING_V110_SDK71_{msvc}
cflags=/D_WIN32_WINNT=0x0501{msvc}

Robb

[TimStone]

Robb,

I use Visual Studio for development and testing, but .mak files for the actual distribution .exe files. I also still have VS 2019 installed, so I have the older files. On that version I will continue to build the distribution file using 2019, but my next major upgrade will be 64 bit / 32 bit dual builds using VS 2022. I will expect my clients to upgrade their OS to use it.

Tim

[rhlawek]

I understand, just letting you know there is a solution to building on the most current MS compiler. As a rule I don't even build 32 bit apps any longer, with the exception of these few systems left that I must support. And those I'm working as fast as I can to make them go away, but I don't own or control all the pieces.