Including .NET assemblies in a VB6 manifest?

Question

I am working on a vb6 project and want to create a manifest so no registering is required.

I use MMM (Make My Manifest) tool which scans your VB6 project for dll dependencies and generates the manifest.

However, the MMM does not include tlb files, and I have a Client.dll and Client.tlb written in .net that which has been exposed to COM and used in my VB6 program.

I don't to you use Regasm as it would be nice if no register to the registry is done.

I tried to generate a seperate manifest for the via the mt tool in command line, 'mt.exe -tlb:Client.tlb -dll:Client.dll -out:Client.manifest'

Then I thought I could merge the 2 manifest via: 'mt.exe -manifest program.exe.manifest client.manifest -out:program.exe.manifest'

However, when I run the program I'm getting an message box that says ' Run-time error -2147220999 (800401f9): Automation error , Error in the Dll'

Am i doing things correctly above, anyone had similar experience, any help appreciated.

A [ComVisible] .NET assembly requires the <clrClass> element in the manifest. A VB6 tool won't know how to do that. The best way to merge manifests is with a text editor. And writing one: msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/eew13bza%28v=VS.80%29.aspx — Hans Passant

wqw wqw · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-09T10:42:58

Here is a short description how UMMM does it:

First, for the .Net dll it generates a manifest to a temp file with this

mt.exe -nologo -managedassemblyname:"{dotnet_dll}" -nodependency -out:"{dotnet_dll}.manifest"

Then embeds this manifest into .Net dll as RT_MANIFEST resource 2 with this

mt.exe -nologo -manifest "{dotnet_dll}.manifest" -outputresource:"{dotnet_dll}";2

Finally references the .Net dll from the VB6 executable by extracting assemblyIdentity tag from .Net dll manifest and adding it to the reg-free manifest inside dependency\dependentAssembly tag like this
```
<dependency>
    <dependentAssembly>
        <assemblyIdentity name="PdfSigner" version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="msil" />
    </dependentAssembly>
</dependency>
```

This way clrClass tags Hans mentions appear in the the .Net dll embedded manifest and not in the VB6 executable manifest.

Including .NET assemblies in a VB6 manifest?

1 Answers