Task failed because "AxImp.exe" was not found when migrating code from Ranorex 5 to Ranorex 7 or Ranorex 8

[chiranthurs]

Hi Alex,

Since we are migrating all our scripts to the latest version of Ranorex 8.3 across all our VM's say (25 VM's) we will have to install visual studio 2010 on all these VM's and its a known fact that Visual studio 2010 comes with a licence and with an additional cost as we are already paying for the licence of Ranorex. Migration should not happen with these additional costs in my opinion.

Regards,
Chiranth

[odklizec]

Hi,

Shouldn't installing Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable help with this issue? I don't have Visual Studio 2010 installed and everything works as expected? In fact, all I have from Visual Studio is Team Explorer 2013, which is free of charge. So the requirement of installing VS 2010 sounds a bit strange? There must be another way around this problem.

[ahoisl]

Migration should not happen with these additional costs in my opinion.

AxImp.exe was never a part of Ranorex Studio, so you apparently already had a dependency on Visual Studio or the corresponding SDK before.

My guess is that due to the upgrade, the .NET Framework version that the scripts are compiled to changed and consequently you need a newer SDK containing a newer version of AxImp to compile your project.

An alternative to installing VS or the SDK on every machine, is investigating what AxImp is actually needed for. AFAIK it just creates a managed wrapper DLL for a native DLL. If so, you could check that managed DLL into your source control repository and just use that DLL instead of creating the managed wrapper again on every build.

Regards,
Alex
Ranorex Team

[chiranthurs]

Dear Ranorex Team,

One of our colleagues resolved the Aximp.exe file not found issue by just installing “Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows8” as shown below. Hence installation of visual studio 2010 is not required. As per his analysis, he says that installing the latest Ranorex software is deleting this Aximp.exe file from the system and can be got back by installing this SDK. This might be an issue in Latest Ranorex installation. Request you to please flag this issue to your development team and get it fixed going forward.

Note: PFA the screen shot attached for installing the "Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows8".

Regards,
Chiranth

[ahoisl]

We do not explicitly uninstall AxImp, any .NET Framework or SDK, but the Ranorex 8.3 setup triggers the installation of .NET 4.6.2 - which could potentially remove older versions of the framework (although they should be installed in parallel AFAIK).

The build problem could be caused by a newer Ranorex version using a newer .NET Framework and MSBuild, respectively, and AxImp not being in the correct path. Unfortunately, like I said earlier, by default Ranorex does not ship or use AxImp. If you use it in your project, you have to make sure that MSBuild uses the correct paths and that the correct prerequisites are installed. Thank you!

Regards,
Alex
Ranorex Team

[Stub]

I made some changes to our Ranorex v9.1.1 solution and ran into this AxImp.exe issue too. I tried installing a Windows8 SDK (which didn't seem to do anything), installing the .NET 4.5 SDK (which said, no, there was already a later version installed) and setting the PATH to the instance of AxImp.exe that was already installed in a Windows10 SDK folder. None of these helped.

In the end I modified the registry and added the NETFXSDK\4.6 key which was entirely missing. I bunged in the path that was present in the 4.6.1 folder. I have no idea why it was insisting on using the path in the 4.6 key. Anyway, this moved me forward to a different issue related to my changes. You can see that I added it to the Wow6432Node path.

RanorexAxImp.png