Upgrade to Visual Studio 2013
Jun 15, 2014
I was planning to replace my 5 year old Sony VGN-FW235J early this year, but the news of Sony selling its VAIO PC business stopped me from an immediate action.
I have been using Sony laptops since 2000 and do not know what to buy next, so I continued to use it until its hard disk crashed recently.
My VS2008/VC9 crashed away with the hard disk. I felt very uncomfortable without a VC compiler in hand, so I started installing VS2013/VC12 on my another Sony VPCEG.
It was the first time I was installing Visual Studio software online, after I finally downloaded the nearly 3G bytes package, also for the first time,
I selected installing all components instead of my usual option of VC compiler only.
The 12G bytes software installation went on smoothly. After it finished, I tried to load Woody's Web Tool written in Visual C++ 2008 project at once.
With only about 10 warnings, the upgrade from VC9 to VC12 was so easy that I even had not noticed the project file name had been changed from .vcproj to .vcxproj.
CamMan in Raw Video Viewers was the second to upgrade, the 2 projects in the .sln were converted with about the same 10 warnings at the same time. I made some usual test, everything was great.
Finally I started to upgrade AR1688 Windows Tools. As I did not know clearly how to test some of the DSP development related projects,
I decided to convert only the Manager.exe at first. Which proved to be a mistake. I had to manually delete old .vcproj file and add new .vcxproj file for each project not converted at first time.
I think it might be a bug for the version Visual Studio 2013 Update 2.
Later I tested those AR1688 Windows Tools on our company Windows Server 2003. It did not surprise me at first time when the error Not a valid Win32 application popped up,
as I knew that I should install Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for Visual Studio 2013 first.
But it really puzzled me some time when the error was still there after the VC12 run time libary was installed.
Finally I found out that the Platform Toolset option should be set as Visual Studio 2013 - Windows XP (v120_xp) instead of the default Visual Studio 2013 (v120).
It is easy to see how Microsoft wishes to be incompatible with old Windows version!
mfc120u.dll Error Message
Dec 6, 2014
An AR1688 user in Mexico sent us the following Manager.exe mfc120u.dll error message in Spanish after he installed Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for Visual Studio 2013 on his Windows 8.1 64-bits.
This reminds me to add an extra note here: install the 32-bits VC run time libary version, even if you are running a 64-bits system.
Upgrade Your WinXP SP2 to SP3
Feb 9, 2015
When you see the GetLogicalProcessorInformation error message, it means it is time to upgrade your WinXP SP2 to SP3.