Was there a Solution for DLL Hell?

[Shintaro1969]

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone had created a solution to DLL Hell?

From memory, it was a problem, but then Win 95 came out and it seemed to fade away.

Cheers,
Craig

[vbdasc]

DLL Hell continued to be a problem in Windows 95, Windows NT and the later versions. AFAIK, Microsoft made several attempts to solve the hell, although none was particularly successful (IMHO). Two of the technologies (possibly there were more) which at least attempted to solve the problem (and were touted as solutions to it) were:

1. OLE/COM/ActiveX

2. Side-by-side assemblies (may have been known as "Project Fusion" pre-2000.)

[dixieLH]

while SxS mostly solved the issue
but some apps (since winblows 8 came out) have tendency to not respect SxS and do its own BS

[Shintaro1969]

Cheers, guys.

Was there a solution for Windows 3.x?

Some form of DLL tracking?

[vbdasc]

For Windows 3.x, only OLE2. 16-bit Windows didn't live long enough, anyway, for MS to care more.

OLE2 came with guidelines for strict versioning and interoperability of published COM interfaces of OLE2 server objects. In theory, this should have alleviated the problem. In practice, it didn't, mainly due to OLE2 being not as popular as MS had hoped.

[DOS]

Microsoft provided something which I think was called "Setup API", possibly it came out as part of Windows 3.1, which you were meant to use from your installer to copy files, and it would check the version information to make sure your installer didn't overwrite a newer version of a file with an older version (or perhaps suggest that your installer prompt the user). So long as you don't break backward compatibility when you release a new version of a DLL, or you give it a new name when you do, I suppose that should work well, but I imagine there was plenty of accidental breakage of backward compatibility, and I imagine many installers wouldn't have used the API because it was slightly harder

[dantesquie]

Windows ME had some type of dll checksum checking

It was called SFC (system file checker)
of course, that not solve the entire problem

newer versions have more complete schema for dll tracking while unix-first software based on qt, etc. tends to install the whole dependency tree