Error Code: 0xC0150002 : The application failed to initialize properly. Click on Ok to terminate the application.

I was in the process of making a few changes to a DLL, and whenever I ran the application on any machine other than mine with this new DLL, I got the message : "Error Code: 0xC0150002 : The application failed to initialize properly. Click on Ok to terminate the application.". Now, this error message isn't very nicely documented, even by Microsoft. In fact, their website claims this error is caused because of some Office 2003 -WinXP Pro combination. My error has nothing to do with that.

I eventually found a pointer at one of the forums (due credit, but I can't find the website anymore!). So how to fix it. Do this:
Open both the old DLL that works, and the new DLL you made that refuses to port onto another computer in Visual Studio. Expand the tree and see the Manifest Version. Are they different? Voila! (Assuming they are ofcourse). The problem is that when your runtime MS DLL's (msvcrt family) belong to a VS installation other than yours, your new manifest embedded in the new DLL is unable to use them, hence the crash.

Solution? Recompile the DLL on a machine with the same manifest/VS version. Try again.

Hope this helps!

Labels: Microsoft, Programming, Visual Studio

Problems with Intellisense???

Microsoft probably thought that they were doing a great deal of good to the common programmer by adding Intellisense to the new Visiual Studio. Sure, it has auto expand capabilities, and probably a whole bunch of amazing geeky capabilities, but the bottom line is, it sucks!

It slows down everything on the computer, visiual studio becomes unresponsive and crashes frequently and most people would rather get their work done rather than wonder what "Updating Intellisense..." actually achieves.

Now, Microsoft actually takes the cake by not providing an option to disable this monster, even though it has known issues!! There is no preference that can turn this off, so you have to resort to the usual bit of hacking, and its rather simple in this case, no need to edit registry entries and increase your blood pressure.

Just do this:

rename or delete \VC\vcpackages\feacp.dll

and then restart Visual Studio. It wont take more than 5 minutes for you to notice the pleasant change. VS is all responsive and hardly hangs. In my opinion, even people who do not know what I am talking about should go ahead and make this change. If you really want to know what you will be losing out on, read this.

Credits to the original idea here.

Labels: Programming