MSCVP100D.dll was not found – Problem Solved

Hario is coming along quite nicely, and in my attempt to show it off to a couple of friends, I zipped up the output from Visual Studio 2010 and sent it off. However I was quickly informed by all participants that it didn’t work, throwing the error “This application has failed to start because MSVCP100D.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.“.

Hmm. It didn’t do this for me. From the name it looked like the old Microsoft Visual C++ redistributable file that you need to download if you don’t have Visual Studio installed, so I pointed them to the download page, but it didn’t help. Strange. I Googled the error and got a bunch of results about MSVCR100.dll, and searching the exact error string got me about three results that said to download Visual Studio 2010 and you’d be okay.

It’s obvious in retrospect however – the problem was I’d sent the Debug build, not the Release build. MSVCR100.dll is required for the Release build, and MSVCR100D.dll is required for the Debug build. It’s not a common error, because typically people are smarter than me and send the Release version, resulting in the other error that is solved by downloading the aforementioned redistributable.

The moral of this story is: distribute the Release build, and anyone who can’t run it should only need MSVCP100.dll. Hope that helps someone, someday.