Sharing your VisualStudio 32/64-bits debug/release executables with non-VisualStudio Windows users.

Question

One of my students became a professor and I did send him some of my 32-bits Visual Studio executables. He ran them on Windows 7-11 wthout suporting *.dll's: not a single one succeeded by lacking the apprropiate runtime(?) dll's. I do have 4 executables all of them in both 32 and 64-bits, debug and release versions! Though I tried several attempts but none of them succeeded: both vcruntime140[d].dll and ucrtbased.dll failed. He tried on his own and reported me about "missing *.dll files". Who might help me?

Answer 1

The debug versions of the runtime dlls are NOT redistributable.

The simplest workaround is to distribute a release build of your application that is statically linked to the runtime libraries. A statically linked executable will have no dependencies on the runtime dlls.

Otherwise, you should distribute a release version of your application and the appropriate version of the VC++ redistributables can be obtained from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-US/cpp/windows/latest-supported-vc-redist?view=msvc-170. When your user installs the proper version of the VC++ redistributables on their system release version dll dependencies should be satsififed.