CODEWITHSUNDEEP
winapilanguage-agnostic
Mason Wheeler
Mason Wheeler

Reputation: 84650

Is there a way to programatically check dependencies of an EXE?

I've got a certain project that I build and distribute to users. I have two build configurations, Debug and Release. Debug, obviously, is for my use in debugging, but there's an additional wrinkle: the Debug configuration uses a special debugging memory manager, with a dependency on an external DLL.

There's been a few times when I've accidentally built and distributed an installer package with the Debug configuration, and it's then failed to run once installed because the users don't have the special DLL. I'd like to be able to keep that from happening in the future.

I know I can get the dependencies in a program by running Dependency Walker, but I'm looking for a way to do it programatically. Specifically, I have a way to run scripts while creating the installer, and I want something I can put in the installer script to check the program and see if it has a dependency on this DLL, and if so, cause the installer-creation process to fail with an error. I know how to create a simple CLI program that would take two filenames as parameters, and could run a DependsOn function and create output based on the result of it, but I don't know what to put in the DependsOn function. Does anyone know how I'd go about writing it?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 885

Answers (1)

Ben Voigt
Ben Voigt

Reputation: 283803

You can read the PE imports table to find out what DLLs are required at load time. This is what Dependency Walker does, and also the dumpbin tool included with the Microsoft Platform SDK (which is installed by Visual Studio and also available as a separate download). Some of the debughelp APIs provide access to information from the PE header, but why not invoke the dumpbin tool and inspect its output? Since it's text-based non-interactive it should be pretty straightforward to integrate into your installer build process. Dependency Walker also has a capability to run in non-interactive mode with text output.

If you do need to retrieve the information without the help of any other tool, the ImageDirectoryEntryToDataEx function is a good place to start. Also, here's a question that shows how to do it manually (but do use ImageHlp instead, which knows about all the various variants of the PE format):

Upvotes: 1

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