Side-by-side configuration is incorrect error message given launching Dynamics GP

Patrick Roth - Click for blog homepageIt is somewhat coincidental that one of the system techs had a case Friday running into an error launching Dynamics GP 2010 and the release of Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 Service Pack 5.  What do these events have to do with each other?  Read on...

This customer had just installed GP 2010 and it worked correctly on all machines but one.  On the one machine, Dynamics GP 2010 refused to launch and instead gave the error:

F:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics\GP2010\Dynamics.exe

The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please
see the application event log or use the command-line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail.

As suggested by the message, looking in the Application Event Log shows the message:

Activation context generation failed for "F:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics\GP2010\Dynamics.exe". Dependent Assembly Microsoft.VC90.MFC,processorArchitecture="x86", publicKeyToken="1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b", type="win32",version="9.0.21022.8" could not be found. Please use sxstrace.exe for detailed diagnosis.

I've run across this issue on my own systems so I had a pretty good idea of where to look.

What I'm surprised is why this should happen.  As Dynamics GP 2010 is installed; the Visual 2008 C++ Runtime Redistributable should have also been installed as well.  Of course I don't know how GP 2010 was installed - maybe it wasn't "installed" and just copied?

But in any event, the solution is to load or reload the components again.

On my Windows 7 64 bit machine, if I look in the add/remove programs window I see:

I have a bit newer version of the runtime as well as the ATL Security Update version (though you can't tell from the name what version is what).

I suggested the customer download and install the 32 bit Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable from Microsoft Downloads.  And for the heck of it and to get the 32 bit Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package ATL Security Update and install that as well.  It can't hurt and I suspect that it will be required when the Dynamics GP 2010 SP1 ships sometime this fall.

After loading these suggested redistributables, the user could now launch Dynamics GP 2010 successfully.

If we had wanted to dig into this a bit more, we could have done what the initial error message suggested and used the sxstrace.exe utility to trace an application trying to load these components. This post on the Code Project site talks about the side-by-side configuration error message, the technical reasons you'd get this, and a quick review of the sxstrace.exe application.

So what does this have to do with Dynamics GP 10.0 SP5 or am I just trying to get as many links to previous posts as possible by referencing the SP5 release post?

With 10.0 SP5 (10.0.331 runtime), the reason for the bold warning messages on the Dynamics GP 10.0 service pack page is that you need the latest Visual C++ 2005 ATL security update to work. If this wasn't installed (and we didn't install it for you as the SP5 install checks for) then you would get this same error that the customer above did on GP 2010 - just for a different version of the components since Dynamics GP 10.0 is built on Visual Studio 2005 and not VS 2008 like GP 2010 is.

Best Regards,

Patrick Roth
Developer Support