Ancestors

Written by ROMMIX on 2025-01-11 at 23:58

So iexpress.exe is a simple installer maker already installed with Windows.

In my 30 years of existence, that blew my mind.

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Written by Matt Campbell on 2025-01-12 at 00:17

@rommix0 Wow, I didn't know about that. Based on the file metadata, it apparently came out of the IE division.

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Written by ROMMIX on 2025-01-12 at 00:18

@matt The Internet Explorer division i'm guessing. That's interesting.

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Written by Matt Campbell on 2025-01-12 at 00:18

@rommix0 Sorry, yes, that's what I meant.

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Written by Matt Campbell on 2025-01-12 at 00:26

@rommix0 Apparently they've kept the build definition for that executable maintained just enough to ship a native 64-bit build, but it's still using the old VC++ runtime that Windows has shipped for a long time, not the UCRT. And if it uses the standard C++ library at all, that must be statically linked, so I'm guessing it doesn't. MS code that's as old as I'm guessing this is didn't use many standard C++ library features.

Note: I was on the Windows team at MS from mid 2017 to late 2020.

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Toot

Written by ROMMIX on 2025-01-12 at 00:28

@matt That's a good thing. That means it can compile an installer that will run even on Win9x machines.

Gotta love programs that still rely on VC6 era runtimes.

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