Deploying MSVCRT

End of Dll hell and Side by Side deployment of dlls. Everything gets easier. That’s just the theory in reality you have to carefully choose the right technique to deploy the runtime files.

You can also read this Microsoft section vcredists x86

Here you can find a full page dedicated to deploying Microsoft CRT files. vcredists x86

The conclusion is that the easiest way to go about this is to add the vcredist_x86 package to your setup or search for a proper msm setup package. It will install the required CRT files if required taking care of Side by Side installation too.

We now use the VisualStudio2005 SP1 MSVCRT 8.0 runtime, this means that vcredist_x86 will work without prior Windows Installer 3.0 setup which makes life much easier. On a machine with windows installer prior 3.0 it was necessary to reboot before you could even run the real applicationn setup, now with the new runtime files it will be a one step operation.

This info should save you some hair pulling hours of setup chaos.