I have developed an application which uses the MFCs of VStudio 2008 for its UI, and thus expects some VStudio 2K8 runtime libraries to be present on the system it is launched. Does anyone know on which Windows Platform the MFC runtime of VStudio 2K8 are available per default (after a clean install of the OS)?
I think there are available with a clean installation of Vista. Are they available on clean XP installation?
You should distribute the runtime whatever version the target OS is. On the linked page, MS states:
The Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86) installs runtime components of Visual C++ Libraries required to run applications developed with Visual C++ SP1 on a computer that does not have Visual C++ 2008 SP1 installed.
So I will take the sure way and make no assumption.
You always need to install the Visual Studio runtime redistributable to be sure it's there.
However, one option if you only need one or two of the dlls is to place the redistributable dlls next to your own .exe. This can dramatically reduce the download size, and (by just adding a couple of files along with your exe) avoids having to do anything special with merge modules etc in your installer.