Create Single EXE standalone application run without installation

Question

I want to create a single exe application which should not be using .Net or VB. This should be a single exe without installation which will launch on double click on the exe only.

No idea which technology to be used as it should run on any windows OS without installation of any extra installations.

If any one can help me out in this regard i'll be thankfull.

Thanks & Regards,

Smruti Ranjan Sahoo

Answer 1

Get your hands on a copy of Visual C++ 1.52 and write Win16 code. Chances are you'll be able to make this work on Win3 upwards. Getting a compiler to succesfully target real mode on Win1 or 2 is probably going to be challenging - especially if you want to use DLLs since I doubt even VC1.52 is going to emit the necessary thunks. Of course that code won't run on Win64 - I'm pretty sure that it is impossible to generate an EXE which will run on windows 1 and Win64.

Answer 2

You could write your application in C or C++, linking statically against the C library and whatever GUI library you intend to use (if any); as lightweight, static, modern C++ GUI toolkit I liked SmartWin++, but sadly it seems that it's no longer developed.

Be careful with some newer compiler versions, as far as I know since some version of VC++ (IIRC 2005) the support for older Windows (9x/ME) was dropped, and it's impossible to run executables generated with such versions of VC++ on these platforms, since the CRT uses newer API calls.

If you need your software to work even on such old platforms you should also grab an older copy of MSDN, since the current one says nothing about whether an API is present on Windows 9x/NT, the "compatibility" box seems to think that the first version of Windows ever released was Windows 2000.

IMHO the best VC++ release to build executables for any Windows is VC++ 2003 (7.1): it still has the compatibility for older Windows versions, but has a good support for the C++98 (03?) standard (contrast with VC++6, which has very poor template support). IIRC the VC++ 7.1 compiler has been made available for free by Microsoft, and it can be used with IDEs like Code::Blocks.

Also, MinGW is an alternative worth considering, it should be able to build executables for any Win32 target.

Answer 3

Well you should probably write a C/C++ app for that. But if you use the core .NET libraries you could assume that windows machine will have the .NET runtime, at least those that have all the necessary patches.