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If I were to deploy an unmanaged application that was built using Visual Studio 2015 and that was linked dynamically to CRT, is it sufficient to just install the appropriate vcredist_.exe redistributables on the target PC? Reason I am asking is, starting VS 2015, we have been bestowed with Universal CRT and I am not sure if the aforementioned redistributable package already contains the UCRT DLLs too.

I have read the September 11, 2015 update to this blog post: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/03/03/introducing-the-universal-crt/. It says app-local deployment is possible but what if we want to go the re-distributable way?

Can someone confirm?

ForeverLearning
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    It is distributed through Windows Update. So if you run into a client that doesn't have it then you have a client that is not keeping his machines updated. He'll be a big maintenance headache, the kind of pita that nobody wants to deal with. Or is very strict about updates for some reason, won't appreciate you doing it for him. Best to have him sort it out by himself. – Hans Passant Nov 29 '16 at 22:00
  • @HansPassant Which probably eliminates app-local deployment considering there are 40+ DLLs and I have to ship them all. Not to mention my product doesn't necessarily have all the binaries in a single folder. Sigh. – ForeverLearning Nov 29 '16 at 22:05
  • Not at all. You still need to distribute msvcr140.dll and (probably) msvcp140.dll, fit nicely in the same directory as the EXE and all the other DLLs. – Hans Passant Nov 29 '16 at 22:15
  • @HansPassant I think you misunderstood. Those 40+ DLLs I was talking about were the UCRT DLLs. Microsoft seems to recommend that I ship them all (for app-local deployment) because I would need a different subset of them on different OSes. The binaries specific to our product are spread over a hierarchical folder structure. That would mean the dependent DLLs (UCRT+CRT) would need to go into each of them. A nightmare. – ForeverLearning Nov 30 '16 at 14:41
  • Hi @ForeverLearning did you find a solution? I'm also wanting to redistribute Universal CRT but MS recommends not doing anything and hoping that users' installations are up to date. – Juan Sep 19 '21 at 10:43

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