Standalone VS 2010 C++ Program

Question

it's been a long while since I've used VS 2010 and C++, and as I'm getting back to using it, I'm running into the same problems that plagued me last year: the exe's that I compile do not run well on older machines that do not have the correct C++ runtimes. I do not even know what link to give them, and I told them to install this after they had an error that said "The program can't start because MSVCR100.dll is missing from your computer. Try Reinstalling the program to fix this problem. Click OK to close the application."). So I went in and set the code generation to /MT and disabled quite a few options, and tried messing around with lots of options, but still the same result.

My question is: Is there a list of complete VS 2010 C++ distributables that I can just give and tell them to install so all of the C++ programs I compile on my VS 2010 will work on Windows XP, or even better, a way to general a standalone exe that contains all it needs to work, and does not rely on DLLs? I'm thinking like linking to a library that has everything the exe references. If it helps, I'm building for both x64 and x86.

P.S. What's up with the manifest file, should I include it or not?

Answer 1

The easiest thing to do is to just install the VC++ Redistributable Package. It has both x86 and x64 versions.

Answer 2

Firstly, before I actually give you the detail:

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Warning

If you do this, things will be bad for two reasons:

1. If there are security or other bugs in the MSVC runtimes, and you take this approach, they're baked into your app which means you need to re-distribute. DLLs are preferred because theoretically people use system update which means any errors get fixed.
2. Everything else you compile into your exe also needs to do this. If you don't, you end up with two versions of the code and whatever you're using won't link.

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One possible solution is to bake the MSVC runtime into your application, by using the cl.exe option (C/C++ compiler settings) /MT which means multi-threaded version of the C/C++ runtime linked statically. As I said, if you try to link against something that is linked itself dynamically to the runtime, you're going to end up in a mess. Also, as I said, this represents an additional security risk factor, so bear that in mind.

The other options are to write an installer that can either download the appropriate runtime, or include the DLL needed.

If you're using some feature of the runtime that exceeds a certain version of Windows (generic statement, but it does happen) then you should be able to use the Windows SDK to target various versions of Windows using appropriate C runtimes.

Answer 3

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=a7b7a05e-6de6-4d3a-a423-37bf0912db84

google text: visual studio c++ redist

Do not statically link to the runtime; specifically don't do so if you're using any kind of dll for other purposes. It introduces all kinds of bogus problems wrt heap management that you probably don't want to mess with.

Answer 4

Open the properties dialog for your project and select Configuration Properties | C/C++ | Code Generation. The default setting is Multi-threaded DLL. Change that to Multi-threaded and you'll be building and .EXE with the run-time statically linked in. Don't forget to do the same for the debug version.

If you're using MFC or ATL, you will need to navigate to Configuration Properties | General and set "Use of MFC" or "Use of ATL" to link statically as well.

NB: If you link the runtime statically, you must make sure that any other library you're linking in also links it in statically. Otherwise you'll wind up with two copies of the runtime in memory, each with its own heap and bad things will happen when code using one runtime tries to free an object allocated by the other runtime.

Answer 5

This previous answer should hold true for VS2010. I still build with VS2005, but all my apps use the static CRT for the sole reason of being able to run across old and newer machines alike.