MSVC 2015 Universal CRT for app-local deployment

c++ deployment visual-studio-2015 redistributable vcredist
Filip Konvička picture Filip Konvička · Sep 16, 2015 · Viewed 9.1k times · Source

It was announced that the Universal CRT would be a re-distributable DLL such that app-local deployment would still be possible.

I have installed the Visual Studio 2015 Express Edition and I was looking for ucrtbase.dll in the SDK directories, but I could not find anything. The directory that I looked into was "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Kits\10", but that only has the debug version of the CRT under "Microsoft.UniversalCRT.Debug".

I prefer not to copy any DLLs from my system, I always only package files from the "Redist" directories. So for instance (like with the previous versions of MSVC), I re-distribute files from "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\redist\x86\Microsoft.VC140.CRT" with x86 builds of my app.

Is there a package that I can download that contains the ucrtbase.dll, or perhaps a Visual Studio or SDK update?

Also I am not sure at this point whether just the ucrtbase.dll will be sufficient, as the applications seem to be linked to the stub DLLs api-*.dll, and I'm not sure whether those need to be re-distributed as well.

Answer

melak47 picture melak47 · Sep 16, 2015

This blog post under Distributing Software that uses the Universal CRT section describes all the cases in detail, with a big red update notice concerning app-local deployment:

Updated September 11, 2015: App-local deployment of the Universal CRT is supported. To obtain the binaries for app-local deployment, install the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 10. The binaries will be installed to C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Redist\ucrt. You will need to copy all of the DLLs with your app (note that the set of DLLs are necessary is different on different versions of Windows, so you must include all of the DLLs in order for your program to run on all supported versions of Windows)

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