C++ Program built on Windows 7 with VS2012 /w Update 3 does not run on WinXP SP3

Question

I have a program I compiled on a Windows 7 box with Visual Studio 2012 Update 3. I selected the "Visual Studio 2012 - Windows XP (v110_xp)" platform toolset when I built it. However, when I try to run the binary on a Windows XP SP3 box, I get the following error:

"The procedure entry point inet_ntop could not be located in the dynamic link library WS2_32.DLL."

Now, I'm pretty sure I know what this error means: it means the DLL loader could not find the inet_ntop() function in the WS2_32.DLL thats on the WinXP box. Knowing that this would only treat a symptom of the problem and not the source, I copied the WS2_32.DLL from the Win7 box into the same directory that I have the EXE on the WinXP box. I got passed that error, only to have it replaced with a similar error but this time referring to a function found in MSVCRT.DLL.

Oddly, copying the MSVCRT.DLL from the Win7 box to the WinXP box didn't get me pass the error this time.

Does anybody know what I need to do get the binary to work on WinXP? If it came down to it, I'll setup a WinXP development environment in a virtual machine and just do builds from there. That's a lot of work at this point, so I'd rather just keep doing builds on my Win7 box.

Thanks!

Answer 1

According to MSDN inet_ntop() is only available for Windows Vista and later.

If you only need to work with IPv4, you could use inet_ntoa(), or failing that, you can use the Winsock functions WSAAddressToString() and WSAStringToAddress() as it mentions in the Remarks section of the inet_ntoa() documentation: