There are different ways of deploying of a product, which I don't want to discuss because you did not explain your requirements. I would personally prefer just to copy a file to a target machine, but .EXE is supposed to be able to work like that.
Anyway, Visual Studio is never required on the target machine. Never. In worse case, you need to install so called "Visual Studio re-distributable" bundled with each version of Visual Studio. You have a right of unlimited re-distribution with your product.
Everyone can download the re-distributable package free of charge. For example:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5555[
^].
—SA