PEBundle is a revolutionary tool that allows for DLLs or other files to be ‘bundled’ with an executable, therefore removing the requirement to distribute the bundled files separately from the application. With two operational modes, one that uses advanced techniques to resolve dependencies on a bundled DLL in memory without ever extracting to disk, and another that extracts bundled files to disk at runtime, it is a great tool to optimize software distributions.
Reviewing 2.00 Beta 6 (Sep 21, 2001)
Seems like a good idea. Keeping dlls separate is sometimes annoying. One example of this is with VB runtime dlls. When coding a quick little utility that certainly wasnt big enough to justify creating an installer package or whatever delphi was always my preference due to not needing to worry whether run time dlls were installed on any PCs the util would be used on. With this I assume it would allow you to package the VB runtimes into the main exe thus removing the headache of making sure vb (etc) run time dlls are already in place.
Reviewing 1.00 Beta 3 (Aug 9, 2000)
Great product.
The argument about linking DLL's into an EXE has been around forever. Sometimes you do want to bundle a DLL with an EXE. Agreed it would be stupid to bundle DirectDraw DLL's with a commerical game but for a custom application this tool makes sense.
Awhile back I was thinking about building this functionality into a custom utility I'd written. I'm glad PEBundle was around and have been using it for a couple of months in my testing. I've seen it improve drastically in that time. The author is definitely working on it actively and responds to bug reports and request for features.
I've yet to put my custom utility into a production environment but will be buying and using a copy of PEBundle before I do.
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