3.9 Deployment

In this chapter it is described which components should be put into a set-up file, if one have written his own software using the RAYGUIDE API and wants to distribute it to his customers.

Distributing Plug-ins

As could be seen in the Writing Plug-ins tutorial, there are two things to do when integrating a plug-in into RAYGUIDE:

Copy the DLL containing your plug-ins into RAYGUIDE's Plugins folder in the installation directory, normally
C:\Program Files\RAYLASE\RAYGUIDE\bin\Plugins\.
Copy the icon files used by your plug-ins (if there are any) into RAYGUIDE's Icons folder in the configurations directory: C:\Programdata\RAYLASE\RAYGUIDE\Resources\Icons\.

Therefore, the set-up routine needs to figure out RAYGUIDE's installation folder, which can be done by reading the value HKLM\SOFTWARE\RAYLASE\RAYGUIDE\Setup\InstallFolder in the Windows registry and adding \bin\Plugins to the path to complete the path.

The ProgramData folder can be found in the Windows registry under the key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\ProgramData or by means of the Windows environment variable %programdata%; just add the path \RAYLASE\RAYGUIDE\Resources\Icons to it.

Distributing Applications

Binaries

An application as described in our Hello World example or the Embedding Parts of RAYGUIDE tutorial contains all needed parts and DLLs in the binary folder created by Visual Studio. It should be enough to copy the Release directory anywhere on the target machine and to start the executable file from there.

But there is one exception of this rule: Since RAYGUIDE depends on two native libraries (TBarCode for creating barcodes and SkiaSharp for handling 2D graphics) the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 must be installed on the target machine additionally.

Licensing

When distributing a plug-in a RAYGUIDE lincence will be probably already available on the target machine. This may not be the case if one wants to install an application on a machine without RAYGUIDE. If the application contains code that needs a RAYGUIDE licence, e. g. for loading jobs or marking, some additional action is necessary:

RAYGUIDE uses WIBU Systems' CodeMeter software for licensing. Therefore the CodeMeter Runtime Service has to be installed and running on the target machine. The CodeMeter User Runtime for Windows can be downloaded here.

Finally a full or at least a SDK license for RAYGUIDE is necessary. How this can be obtained is described in chapter Lincences and Updates in the RAYGUIDE User Manual. If a software key is preferred instead of a hardware dongle one can use alternatively the additional tool Licence Manager for handling the licensing process rather than RAYGUIDE as described in the manual:

RAYGUIDE Licence Manager

The binary can be found in the Tools folder of RAYGUIDE's installation directory, and the LicenceManager.exe can be distributed with the software if needed.