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Creating A Portable App from Scratch

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knightcon
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Creating A Portable App from Scratch

I am wanting to write a portable application from scratch which can be launched through the portable apps.com launcher. I was reading the page saying how to create a portable app and it discussed checking to see if the application used various system-specific features like registry, documents and settings, etc, and then creating a wrapper for it. could anyone give me any advice on how to create an application which is soley going to be run through PortableApps.com

Simeon
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Some ideas

There are a lot workarounds used by John for Apps that use the registry or store data in various places to keep them compliant with the specs used here. But the less we have to use the better.:)
If you do an Application from scratch the best thing regarding compatibility with PortableApps.com would be if it wouldn't write to the Registry and have a switch to pass the path where the config files are located.
That would be the easiest Application to make portable.

Hope that helps and welcome here Smile

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rab040ma
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If you are only writing a

If you are only writing a program to be portable, using a command line parameter to tell it where to put its settings is ideal. I suppose you could have it save to the application's own directory if there is nothing on the command line.

If you want it to be either portable or installed, it might be a good idea to have the default place be appdata. Or have it use the Registry unless told otherwise on the command line. It can be awkward for a regular program to save things to its own folder.

The important thing for portability is that there be an easy and unambiguous way to tell the program where to put its settings and/or data that keeps it from writing to the registry or appdata or My Documents.

MC

knightcon
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Thanks for that guy's, the

Thanks for that guy's, the language I primarily code in is visual basic 6. Is this a language that can be used by portable apps. Can an application written in VB6 be used as a portable app when run through the portable wrapper.

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OliverK
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It can be, but I don't

It can be, but I don't believe VB6 is ideal. This is because VB6 requires the VB6 run time. Although, I'm probably being set up for correction from someone.

You can, but you may have some caveats from the "truly-portable" of the crowd

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