Distributing an Application that calls Visual Studio built DLLs

Question

I have a LabVIEW application that calls a Visual Studio 2005 built DLL, that then calls functions from another Visual Studio built DLL. When trying to distribute this application it will execute perfectly well on all machines with Visual Studio installed, but on any machine that doesn't have Visual Studio installed, despite installing the Visual Studio Redistributable Package on the machine, I get the error message on attempting to run the application:- "Missing External Function 4575Interface.dllname of function):C in (sub VI that uses function).vi" for the 10+ VIs that use functions called from that dll.
Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Hi,
You will need to manually add all of the DLLs you
are calling into your LabVIEW project. Check in the folder
"Dependencies" in your Project Explorer what external DLLs the VIs are
using, then drag and drop those DLLs into your project. LabVIEW will
not automatically include these external DLLs when you specify a build
specification unless you explicitly tell it to do so. When you
distribute the application using an executable, always explicitly
select those DLLs as "Always Included". Finally, register these DLLs on
the target machine by using Windows command: regsvr32.exe. I would recommend you to write a Windows batch file *.bat to ease the deployment process. 
Another
point to note is, the DLLs you will find in the folder "Dependencies"
are the DLLs LabVIEW automatically recognized through what you are
calling in your program. However if any of these DLLs is linking some
other DLLs, LabVIEW will not be able to detect them on the build, so
you will need to add the DLLs into your project manually for
distribution.
Hope this helps,
Best regards,
Mark M.
Applications Engineer
National Instruments UK & Ireland