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Redistributing By Using Merge Modules

Visual Studio installs several merge modules for each Visual C++ component that may be redistributed with your application. They may be found in the Program Files\Common Files\Merge Modules folder. Each of these merge modules may be used to deploy Visual C++ DLLs to the target system. However only non-debug versions of Visual C++ DLLs are allowed to be redistributed. For a complete list of merge modules that are allowed to be used redistributed, please see Redist.txt.

Using Visual C++ redistributable merge modules, you can install Visual C++ DLLs into system/32. Visual Studio itself uses this technique to install these DLLs. If an installation is run by a user who does not have administrative rights, the Visual C++ DLLs cannot be installed, and applications that depend on those DLLs cannot run.

The alternative redistribution approach is to install private DLLs in the directory of a particular user application. For more information on deploying Visual C++ files as private assemblies see Redistributing Visual C++ Files.

See Also

Tasks

How to: Add Merge Modules to a Deployment Project

Concepts

Redistributing Visual C++ Files