Why does my application fail when run on computers that don't have Visual Studio installed?

If you get an error message like "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0150002)" when you try to run your application on a computer that doesn't have Visual Studio installed, it is probably because the proper C runtime DLLs are missing on that computer. This is one of the trickier aspects of using Microsoft's development tools because you need to have access to the same version of the DLLs that you linked with. So if you link dynamically to the C runtime library, you will have to either include the C runtime DLLs with your installer or provide a way for users to obtain the propert DLLs. To me this seems like a bad idea for most programs because it is rare that a program will use all that many functions in the runtime library. So for many cases it is probably more efficient to statically link the C runtime library using /MT on the command line instead of /MTD. This will usually yield binaries that are smaller than the combined size of the dynamically linked binary and the DLL file. Static linking will ensure that your program will run even without access to any DLLs.