How do I make a fully statically linked exe with Visual Studio Express 2005

Question

My current preferred C   environment is the free and largely excellent Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Express edition  From time to time I have sent release  exe files to other people with pleasing results  However recently I made the disturbing discovery that the pleasing results were based on more luck that I would like  Attempting to run one of these programs on an old  2001 vintage  not scrupulously updated  XP box gave me nothing but a nasty  System cannot run x exe   or similar  message   Some googling revealed that with this toolset  even specifying static linking results in a simple hello-world exe actually relying on extra  dll files  msvcm80 dll etc    An incredibly elaborate version scheming system  manifest files anyone   then will not let the  exe run without exactly the right  dll versions  I don t want or need this stuff  I just want an old fashioned self contained  exe that does nothing but lowest common denominator Win32 operations and runs on any old win32 OS   Does anyone know if its possible to do what I want to do with my existing toolset    Thank you

User · Answer

I ve had this same dependency problem and I also know that you can include the VS 8 0 DLLs  release only  not debug ---and your program has to be release  too  in a folder of the appropriate name  in the parent folder with your  exe    How to  Deploy using XCopy  MSDN   Also note that things are guaranteed to go awry if you need to have C   and C code in the same statically linked  exe because you will get linker conflicts that can only be resolved by ignoring the correct libXXX lib and then linking dynamically  DLLs    Lastly  with a different toolset  VC   6 0  things  just work   since Windows 2000 and above have the correct DLLs installed

User · Answer

For the C-runtime go to the project settings  choose C C   then  Code Generation    Change the  runtime library  setting to  multithreaded  instead of  multithreaded dll    If you are using any other libraries you may need to tell the linker to ignore the dynamically linked CRT explicitly

User · Answer

In regards Jared s response  having Windows 2000 or better will not necessarily fix the issue at hand  Rob s response does work  however it is possible that this fix introduces security issues  as Windows updates will not be able to patch applications built as such   In another post  Nick Guerrera suggests packaging the Visual C   Runtime Redistributable with your applications  which installs quickly  and is independent of Visual Studio

User · Answer

My experience in Visual Studio 2010 is that there are two changes needed so as to not need DLL s   From the project property page  right click on the project name in the Solution Explorer window     Under Configuration Properties --  General  change the  Use of MFC  field to  Use MFC in a Static Library   Under Configuration Properties --  C C   --  Code Generation  change the  Runtime Library  field to  Multi-Threaded   MT     Not sure why both were needed   I used this to remove a dependency on glut32 dll   Added later  When making these changes to the configurations  you should make them to  All Configurations  --- you can select this at the top of the Properties window  If you make the change to just the Debug configuration  it won t apply to the Release configuration  and vice-versa

[c++] How do I make a fully statically linked .exe with Visual Studio Express 2005?

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