EZTwain Pro - DLL Bundling

by Spike McLarty, Principal Engineer
2005.11.18

There are several products that can pack multiple DLLs into an EXE, so that the end-user (and curious competitors) only see the EXE. One is PE Bundle by Collake Software, the other is MoleBox by Teggo.

I downloaded both programs in trial version and tested them with EZTwain and our sample application 'Twerp'. I somewhat preferred MoleBox: It has several modes, but in one mode it claims to load & run the packed DLLs without ever writing them to disk. The DLLs certainly never appear in the directory with the EXE - I checked. Making EZTwain Pro work well with MoleBox required a small modification to EZTwain, which is included in version 3.09b15. The bundled EXE is a good bit smaller than the separate files because MoleBox compresses the DLLs, and there is some duplication between our DLLs which the compression may squeeze out.

I also tried PE Bundle, but found its user interface harder to understand and documentation less helpful, and the version I tried seemed always to extract the DLLs into the executable directory.