ms.date: 02/07/2022

Installation of your application on a computer other than your development computer is known as *deployment*. When you deploy a Visual C++ application to another computer, you must install both the application and any library files it depends on. Visual Studio enables three ways to deploy the Visual C++ libraries together with your application: *central deployment*, *local deployment*, and *static linking*. Central deployment puts the library files under the Windows directory, where the Windows Update service can update them automatically. Local deployment puts the library files in the same directory as your application. You must redeploy any locally deployed libraries yourself to update them. Static linking binds the library code into your application. You must recompile and redeploy your application to take advantage of any updates to the libraries when you use static linking.

- *Redistributable package* files. These are stand-alone command-line executables that contain all the Visual C++ Redistributable libraries in compressed form. The latest Redistributable packages are available from [Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable Latest Supported Downloads](latest-supported-vc-redist.md).

A merge module enables the inclusion of setup logic for a specific Visual C++ library in a Windows Installer application setup file. You can include as many or as few merge modules as your application requires.

Because central deployment by using a redistributable package or merge modules enables Windows Update to automatically update the Visual C++ libraries, we recommend that you use the library DLLs in your application instead of static libraries, and use central deployment instead of local deployment.

In local deployment, library files are installed in your application folder together with the executable file. Different versions of Visual C++ redistributable libraries can be installed in the same folder because the file name of each version includes its version number. For example, version 12 of the C++ runtime library is *`msvcp120.dll`*, and version 14 is *`msvcp140.dll`*.

A library may be spread across multiple additional DLLs, known as *dot libraries*. For example, some functionality in the standard library released in Visual Studio 2017 version 15.6 was added into *`msvcp140_1.dll`*, to preserve the ABI compatibility of *`msvcp140.dll`*. If you use Visual Studio 2017 version 15.6 (toolset 14.13) or later, you may need to locally deploy these dot libraries as well as the main library. These separate dot libraries will eventually be added to the base library, when the ABI changes.

In addition to dynamically linked libraries, Visual Studio supplies most of its libraries as static libraries. You can statically link a static library to your application, that is, link the library object code directly into the application. This creates a single binary without a DLL dependency, so that you don't have to deploy the Visual C++ library files separately. However, we don't recommend this approach because statically-linked libraries can't be updated in place. To update a linked library when you use static linking, you have to recompile and redeploy your application.