Question

I need to create a basic app to check the availability of components and if necessary download them to any computer running Windows XP or above. Which language (preferably free or VS 2010) should I use to create such an application which can run without requiring any frameworks installed beforehand?

Answer 1

could you please elaborate? By static library, do you mean a dll that should reside alongside the exe? or do you refer to available dlls in windows/system32? Also, will programs compiled using this method require the ‘Visual C++ Redistributable’?

When C++ executable links to a static library, then the linker includes the library’s object code in the same file as the EXE. The result is a single *.exe file, and the library does not need to be shipped as a separate *.dll.

The DLLs in windows/system32 are typically O/S files. They’re O/S-specific. You may/must/do not ship/redistribute these files (Microsoft does). Your EXE (or e.g. the C run-time library to which you have statically linked) depends on (requires) some of the functions which are exported from these DLLs. These O/S DLLs tend to be backward-comptible, so that if you target the O/S API which exists on XP, your code will also run on Vista.

I’m guessing that by ‘Visual C++ Redistributable’ you mean “the Visual C run-time library”, whose DLL filename is something like msvcrt80.dll. This is what I talked about in my first paragraph: if you choose the build option (available under project/properties) to statically link to the C run-time library, then the code you require is statically linked into your EXE and you don’t require (don’t run-time link to) this DLL.