size of application

[JohnM]

Good Evening,

I am finishing an application and hopefully will be selling it on a CD.
Right now its 74 MB big. There are alot of pictures in it. I don't have any experience selling an application.
Will this size create any problems for me? Would a user have trouble running it because of this size? or installing it? Probably would require a certain amount of RAM and processor speed?

I apolgized If these questions sound nieve.
Your time is very much appreciated.
John M

 

[Administrator]

What is the application?

What is causing it to be so large?

You say images, what are the images for?

You may want to look into someone like esellerate to help you sell, they also offer a new eCD (or something to that effect) one of my fellow developers told me - he uses it.

 

[JohnM]

Application Size

Neil Thanks for your reply.

The images are only about 10% of the application. I have 15+ forms in it with alot of calculations, datagrids, variables.

Would that size 60-70 MB not work on a desktop PC?

John

 

[Administrator]

What is 60-70 MB exactly? The installer, the EXE, what?

I'd have to say that's probably the largest EXE known to man kind if so! When you run the application on your machine, or in Virtual PC deployment tests, what kind of memory is being consumed by the process in the task manager?

The best way to find out is to TRY IT. I highly recommend using Virtual PC for testing under different OS's and it's part of MSDN. You can get in cheap with the ISV Empower program if you don't already have MSDN.

 

[JohnM]

The size is what the application is before I create an Installer for it. That's the size that Windows Explorer says it is when I right click on its folder.

Does the size of the application shrink when it gets into an installer?

You said alot of good things here.

How can I see task manager at the same time I am running the application?
I never heard of Virtual PC. I do have the academic version of Visual Studio.Net Is MSDN on that? Or Virtual PC too?

I didn't know you could test applications on different O/S without actually putting it on a PC. A friend of mine gave me a copy of Win 2000 so I could put it on another PC and test my application there. I haven't been able to get a copy of Win 98 so I haven't tested it on that one yet. But this Virtual PC can do all these O/S??? wow?

How can I get it?

 

[TPM]

You want to look at the size of the files in the bin folder (ignore the .pdb files) to see how big your app will be. Ctrl+Alt+Del, task manager.

TPM

 

[JohnM]

TPM Thank you very much. I tried the task manager as you said, it works great. I saw that a couple of times that the cpu usage was over 50%. Most of the time it was in the single digits.

I looked at the BIN folder and subtracting the Pdb file, the size of the application so far is less than 8MB.

Would this size cause problems with some PCs? Does the high CPU usage mean some PC's would crash?

Thank you for your time

JohnM

 

[TPM]

No problem. 50% CPU usage doesn't sound too bad, you might want to look through your code to see if you can optimize it though (always a good idea). The same goes with the 8MB. If you can remove redundant code etc.

TPM

 

[Administrator]

Are you compiling in DEBUG or RELEASE mode? Try compiling in RELEASE then do your checks, size, memory, performance, etc. If you're seeing PDB's, I believe you are in DEBUG mode (obviously) and you need to compile to RELEASE build.

 

[TPM]

Not necessarliy a debug (settings) but yes do make sure you are in release.

 

[JohnM]

Thanks for the advice. I will go through the code for redundant stuff. I have 15+ forms and I know that some of the variables can be local instead of what I did with some of them putting in a module and some of the calculations can be shorter I hope.

Your time is very much appreciated.

John M

 

[JohnM]

Neil Thanks, I will compile in Release and see what happens to the size. You mentioned Virtual PC do you have to be a subscriber to MSDN to get this? Does it come with any of them Visual Studio versions?

John M