Comments by Tim Stevens (Top 5 by date)

Thanks, however the 3rd-party DLL uses DLL (not static) linking against msvcr90d.dll. So even if I change all my code to static linking, the msvcr90d.dll DLL still gets loaded, since the 3rd-party DLL requires it. Otherwise your suggestion would work.

Thanks Albert. I can't help thinking I've missed something obvious, but I can't get it to work. SInce it's only for development, it's not really a problem, but I can't help thinking it must be solvable. It seems users (even running as Administrator) can't drop files into winsxs, & I've not managed to get a side-by-side install in the app's directory to work. All the examples I've found on the net refer to the release DLLs, I suspect.

Thanks (I'm not using MFC at all by the way). Tried it - used Process Explorer from sysinternals on my 2008/2012 machine to identify the precise version of the DLL & manifest being loaded. COpied the manifest & DLL onto the 2012 (no 2008) machine. Still will not load. Specifying the manifest for that DLL in the 2012 linker makes no difference. Removing the public keys from the manifest makes no difference.

Maybe I'm being stupid, but I can't get this to work, sorry. If someone can write a 'hello world' CRT-app in VS2012 or 2010, in debug mode, and then get it running (as a debug build, linked against the debug runtime DLLs) on a 2nd machine that does not have VS installed, then this is basically analogous to what I'm trying to achieve - I've been unable to run any debug-linked code on a machine that does not have that version of VS installed.

I'll just have to get the others in the team to all install VS2008 just so we can run the debug build of our 2010/2012 app, I guess.

Thanks. However I'm not mixing debug & release at all: The Release configuration works fine. One component I use (written by someone else, no source), exists as both release DLL & debug DLL. When I build my code Debug, I link against their Debug DLL, & when in Release, I link against their Release DLL. Their DLL is built with VS2008. All I want to do is (when built Debug) as part of my testing, put my Debug build on another machine that does have VS2012, but does not have VS2008. To do this, I have to get the debug runtime (msvcr90d.dll) onto that specific machine.

I know that in VS2003 & earlier you could simply copy the DLLs. However now, you can't (well, you can copy them, but it doens';t load). Additionally, even as an Admin command prompt, I can't copy anything to winsxs (W7/64). I've come to the conclusion that this is impossible, or at least not worth the effort. Why does MS always make Windows stuff so difficult?