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FSX:SE Sharing DLL dev experience

E

eric_marciano

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france
Let me tell you the story about what happened to me, hoping it may be useful to some of you.
I was developing a DLL for FSX Steam Edition, a module that is loaded when FSX starts. I was in a development process : write code, generate DLL, launch FSX to test, stop FSX, update code, re-run FSX, and so on… At a certain time, I wrote a new piece of code, ran FSX to test and it crashed before starting. No problem, I reviewed the code and saw my error, fixed it, and ran FSX again. Crash again. The traces were showing the DLL was not even loaded. Strange… To get rid of any doubt, I removed all my new piece of code to roll back to the exact same version as before the crash. I re-generated and ran FSX, crash again before loading the DLL. Very strange.

It was so strange that I thought FSX might be “remembering” this faulty DLL to refuse it and crash. In order to verify this, I changed the name of my DLL (the file name and the name referenced in dll.xml) and ran FSX again, it worked, which proved I was right. I now had to find where this trace was located.
I removed all references of my DLL in fsx.cfg and deleted dxdiag.txt (just in case), it was still crashing. So I checked the registry and found a reference to my DLL in:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator\10.0\Launch
There was a list of DLL references similar to fsx.cfg (with a hash code for each version.) What I understand is that FSX uses this to prevent some DLLs from loading, thus crashing FSX. I removed all the entries where my DLL was referenced (several versions) and voilà… everything was working fine. I fixed my code and re-ran FSX, everything was running fine.

I still wonder what was this designed for. Why does FSX keep a trace of DLL versions that were crashing? Does it mean that if your DLL causes a “big” crash, it should be forbidden forever? I don’t know.
Did you ever experience a similar problem? If you have any other explanation, please let me know.

Eric
 
I wrote my share of FSX DLLs (which at some point of development failed miserably), but I never had this happen to me. Good to know, thanks for sharing!
 
Thanks for your feedback.
I also made a lot of them, at a time FS2004 was still used. The modules were (easily) developed with fs9 in a way to be compatible with FSX.
These problems I now experience are on FSX only.
 
There was an earlier thread about this, but a search doesn't turn it up. So much for my leet google-fu skilzz. Yes, I've had it too. In theory it could also happen in P3D, but I've avoided it so far.
 
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