A colleague recommended this tool to me, so I downloaded it, extracted the zip, and ran Dependencies.exe. But it didn’t show the UI I was expecting. Since I was just double-clicking the exe, I couldn’t see any console output. I just thought, fuck, it doesn’t work.
Some time passed and I tried a newer version, hoping I'd finally get it running. Same shit. This time I took a closer look and finally figured out I needed to run DependenciesGui.exe to get the UI I wanted. At that point, I honestly thought, maybe I’m just dumb as fuck.
Today, I recommended the tool to another colleague, and I was kind of curious to see if he’d make the same mistake. Sure enough, he said, “I can’t run it,”.
So here’s the moral of the story: users expect to launch the program by running Dependencies.exe. There are too many files in the directory to bother scanning for another .exe, and you probably wouldn’t even think that could be the issue. The tool itself is good, but this launch confusion seriously sucks, and I’m guessing I’m not the only one who’s had this problem.
I figured I’d tell you about this because fixing it could make adoption way smoother. My suggestion: put all the DLLs in a subdirectory and leave only the two .exe files in the root. That way, when someone extracts the archive, it’s obvious there are two launchable files to pick from or make Dependencies.exe to be the GUI app.
A colleague recommended this tool to me, so I downloaded it, extracted the zip, and ran Dependencies.exe. But it didn’t show the UI I was expecting. Since I was just double-clicking the exe, I couldn’t see any console output. I just thought, fuck, it doesn’t work.
Some time passed and I tried a newer version, hoping I'd finally get it running. Same shit. This time I took a closer look and finally figured out I needed to run DependenciesGui.exe to get the UI I wanted. At that point, I honestly thought, maybe I’m just dumb as fuck.
Today, I recommended the tool to another colleague, and I was kind of curious to see if he’d make the same mistake. Sure enough, he said, “I can’t run it,”.
So here’s the moral of the story: users expect to launch the program by running Dependencies.exe. There are too many files in the directory to bother scanning for another .exe, and you probably wouldn’t even think that could be the issue. The tool itself is good, but this launch confusion seriously sucks, and I’m guessing I’m not the only one who’s had this problem.
I figured I’d tell you about this because fixing it could make adoption way smoother. My suggestion: put all the DLLs in a subdirectory and leave only the two .exe files in the root. That way, when someone extracts the archive, it’s obvious there are two launchable files to pick from or make Dependencies.exe to be the GUI app.