Deploy C++ CLI wrapper project

Question

I don't know any further and hopefully, someone can help me out (even if I cannot share code / libraries).

I have a C# .NET 5.0 WPF application , which references a C# .NET 5.0 Class library (project reference). This library communicates with a C++ CLI .NET 5.0 library (where some complex C++ code is running and I don't know, if I can change this to something like P/invoke).

You probably have heard of BadImageFormatException which seems to be very often happening using this combination, and I googled a lot to this topic.

My problem is, that I can run the application on my development machine (from Visual Studio or compiled binaries (exe from file system)), but when I want to provide this program to someone else, who has not Visual Studio installed, this person gets this BadImageFormatException .

I set up a VM to try out further and installed the following runtimes (the application is set to run as 32-bit):

• Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 - x68 (9.0.21022)

• Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 x86 Redistributable - 10.0.30319

• Microsoft Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable (x64) - 12.0.30501

• Microsoft Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable (x86) - 12.0.30501

• Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2019 Redistributable (x64) - 14.25.29914

• Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2019 Redistributable (x86) - 14.25.29914

• Microsoft Windows Desktop Runtime - 5.0.5 (x64)

• Microsoft Windows Desktop Runtime - 5.0.5 (x86)

As the application worked fine on my machine, I think I can exclude issues regarding 32-bit / 64-bit mismatchings (which is often the source of the BadImageFormatException ), so maybe there is just something missing in terms of runtimes / redistributables /...

In addition I should mention, that I never had programmed with C++ before, therefore I don't know the restrictions / requirements to deploy these kinds of applications.

Answer 1

I was able to fix it by myself!

In the *.vcxproj file, I accidentally made it to set the Release configuration to <UseDebugLibraries>true</UseDebugLibraries> , changing this value to false solved all problems automagically.

<PropertyGroup Condition="'$(Configuration)|$(Platform)'=='Release|Win32'" Label="Configuration">
    <ConfigurationType>DynamicLibrary</ConfigurationType>
    <UseDebugLibraries>false</UseDebugLibraries>
    <PlatformToolset>v142</PlatformToolset>
    <CLRSupport>NetCore</CLRSupport>
    <CharacterSet>Unicode</CharacterSet>
</PropertyGroup>