How can I test the Visual C++ Redistributable?

Question

Our company is preparing for a company-wide upgrade to Windows 7 64-bit. The people running the upgrade project have assembled a list of applications that need to be installed on every machine, and myself and my colleagues are being tasked with testing all these apps in the new OS.

We have three different versions of the Visual C++ Redistributable on our master list of applications, but nobody seems to know exactly which applications uses these libraries, and they want us to test them. Merely verifying that they're installed is not enough.

I doubt there is any good way to see if an application references the visual c++ redist, but if there is let me know. I was wondering if there was any kind of visual c++ "test app" available that would let me execute some code from the libraries. Or maybe I would have to develop something, but I'm a C# guy so I'm not too familiar. If this proves to be too difficult or if I can come up with a good explanation of why we don't need to do this, then perhaps I can convince the project managers this isn't necessary.

So... can anybody suggest a good way I could test the Visual C++ Redistributable?

Answer 1

Running a short but non-trivial C++ application built with the matching toolchain and the "use library as DLL" (/MD) compiler option should be sufficient to find whether the library is actually usable.