title: Building and deploying dll on windows: SxS, manifests and all that jazz
body: <p>Since VS 2005, I see that it is not possible to simply build a dll against MS runtime and deploy them together (<a href="http://www.ddj.com/windows/184406482" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.ddj.com/windows/184406482</a>). I am deeply confused by manifest, SxS and co: MSDN documentation is really poor, with circular references; specially since I am more a Unix guy, I find all those uninformative. My core problem is linking a dll against msvc9 or msvc8: since those runtime are not redistributable, what are the steps to link and deploy such a dll ? In particular, how are the manifest generated (I don't want mt.exe, I want something which is portable across compilers), how are they embedded, used ? What does Side by side assembly mean ?</p>
  
  <p>Basically, where can I find any kind of specification instead of MS jargon ?</p>
  
  <p>Thank you to everyone who answered, this was really helpful, </p>