Symphony 7.1 Installers do not include all required dlls

When I first tried to run a .NET Symphony application on my 7.1 cluster it failed with the error message that Platform.Symphony.Soam.Net4.0.dll or one of its dependencies was missing. Examining the process clearly showed that the Platform dll was trying to load msvcr100.dll and msvcp100.dll. The same is true for Symphony client applications using the Platform.Symphony.Soam.Net4.0.dll.

The VC++ runtime that these dlls come from was not installed by the Symphony nor is it mentioned as required in the documentation. There are older versions of these file in the lib and lib64 folders in the soam directory, so clearly these files have been recognized as required in the past.

I have raised this as a PMR but the developer feedback given to support is that this is not a bug and it is the application developers that must include these files in their service and client applications. We have been pointed at the following statement in the developer tutorials from SampleApp:

Your first synchronous Symphony C# client and service:
Package the sample service.
You must package the files required by your service to create a service package.
Note: Make sure the .dll files s are included in your service package.

I interpret this as a reminder to developers to ensure to include all of the dlls generated by the example code in the service package that they generate.

I fundamentally disagree with the assertion that this is not a bug. These are common files that are required by Symphony components; they are not directly referenced by my applications. It is not acceptable to expect these files to be included by developers in every .Net client and service application they release. I would also note that it was not necessary to include these files in previous versions of Symphony.

The fix for this issue is very simple - it just requires adding the appropriate VC++ runtime dlls for x86 and x64 to the Symphony msi files. Let's please just get it done.