Sometimes, however, the stated error message doesn’t make much sense (for example, it complains about the wrong binary). If a program can’t start because a static DLL dependency cannot be loaded (maybe it’s missing, or damaged etc.), you get a helpful error dialog stating the name of the affected DLL, which gives you a decent pointer on fixing the issue.
In this post, I’ll reason about why you shouldn’t settle for merely detecting whether this dependency is installed, with two real-world examples. When your product is installed, you (or the installer framework you use) have to make sure that the appropriate version of the redistributable is also installed, or your program will fail to start. Chances are that you link your binaries against the dynamic runtime DLLs, which means that your application has a runtime dependency of (at least some of the) DLLs contained in this redistributable package. If you ship software on Windows written in C++ and compiled with the MSVC toolchain, then you probably heard about the so-called “Visual Studio C++ Redistributable”.
TL DR: It’s worth not just detecting, but also trying out whether it actually works.
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