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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T16:29:40+00:00

I’ve been scouring the web for information on this and cannot come to a

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I’ve been scouring the web for information on this and cannot come to a safe conclusion without finding a maching with none of the CRT dll’s installed. My application is very small and I don’t want to burden users with potentially bloated installs or the appearance of downloading stuff they don’t need.

I’m tempted to just include the 220kb msvcm90.dll (C Runtime import library compiled as 100% pure MSIL code. All code complies with the ECMA URT spec for MSIL) and 2kb Microsoft.VC90.CRT.manifest in the application’s directory. But , http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/abx4dbyh%28v=VS.90%29.aspx, states that those are now stored in the global assembly cache.

Can someone please verify my proposed solution?

A lot of what I’ve said is reinforced by this post, Visual C++ Redistributables without using VCRedist_x86.exe, but while he has upvotes I’m still to be convinced by the sound of independent testimony.

Please could answers make reference to my manifest which has just the one dependency:

<dependency>
  <dependentAssembly>
    <assemblyIdentity type='win32' name='Microsoft.VC90.CRT' version='9.0.21022.8' processorArchitecture='x86' publicKeyToken='idontknowenuff' />
  </dependentAssembly>
</dependency>

As this doesn’t specify just the managed runtime, it looks like my solution won’t work without full installation (a 4Mb download from MS).

To further complicate things, the version of the runtime in my VC/redist directory is, 9.0.30729.1, but I assume it will be backwards compatible.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Google books turned up:

    “If you compile code that uses the CRT with either the /clr option or the /clr:pure option, you’ll get the appropriate pure MSIL CRT linked in instead of the native CRT”, Gordon Hogenson – 2006

    This seems wrong, as ILDASM shows “.module extern MSVCR90.dll” as the first line of the embedded manifest. I’ll leave this answer here for GC or as a reminder that not everything that is published is gospel.

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