C++ installations have never been easy and probably never will be. Having not done any C++ release work for a number of years I ran into a problem when releasing a C++ application that I built using Visual Studio 2005.
In the old days you had a nightmare working out which version of the C++ libraries to distribute and where to put them. Unless of course you statically link to the libraries which resolves the problem but makes the files rather larger.
But now with building the application using VS 2005, there is this new problem that arises which results in the obsure message
This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect
After a bit of digging into all of this I found that there is a redistributable package from Microsoft that installs the necessary libraries for C++ that were used by VS2005 to build the application in the first place. Where it puts the libraries I don’t know, but to be honest I don’t really care as the installation was very simple and worked first time….so i’m happy for now.
Heres a link to the redistributable package from Microsoft. This is the SP1 version of the package which is required if your VS2005 installation is all up-to-date. If it isn’t there is an older version of the package available from Microsoft, or your could do the right thing and get VS2005 up-to-date instead.