Microsoft's most common Redistributables

Written by Tom Wickline

Thursday, 04 October 2007 08:06

Over the last couple months their has been a number of people to ask about download locations for one or more of Microsoft's redistributables that ive referred to in a howto on the blog. There has also been a small but growing number of people asking questions about what a redistributable comprises of, or what role it plays with regard to Windows and therefore Wine.

Below is a list of the most common redistributables and a quick summery to go along with it. If for some reason you should still have a question about any of the redistributables listed here there is a google search section provided at the top of each page, just do a quick google web search for the redistributable in question and hopefully you will quickly find a relevant answer to your question. But if for some reason you cant find the answer your looking for feel free to post a comment and I will do my best to answer it as soon as possible.

Microsoft TrueType fonts

TrueType is a scalable font technology, which represents glyphs by describing their outlines so that they may be drawn, or rasterized, at any size without the blocky aliasing caused by scaling when using bitmapped fonts. TrueType also makes use of a technique called ``hinting'' which describes appropriate ways to modify the shape of a character for proper rasterizing at small sizes. This allows TrueType fonts to be both displayed on screen at small sizes and used for printing at high resolutions without significant loss of quality.

TrueType technology was originally developed by Apple for use in their MacOS operating system in 1990. It was later licensed by Microsoft for use in their Windows operating system. Since these two operating systems run on the vast majority of personal computers, there are a very large number of TrueType fonts available

Microsoft Rich Edit Control

A rich edit control is a window in which the user can enter, edit, format, print, and save text. The text can be assigned character and paragraph formatting, and can include embedded Component Object Model (COM) objects. Rich edit controls support almost all of the messages and notification messages used with multiline edit controls. Thus, applications that already use edit controls can be easily changed to use rich edit controls. Additional messages and notifications enable applications to access the functionality unique to rich edit controls. Beginning with Microsoft Rich Edit 2.0, there is also single line or multiline capabilities and plain or rich text. The current specification is Rich Edit 4.1. Each version of rich edit is a superset of the preceding one, except that only Asian builds of Rich Edit 1.0 have a vertical text option. Windows 2000/XP Includes Rich Edit 3.0 with a Rich Edit 1.0 emulator.

Microsoft XML Parser (MSXML)

Microsoft XML Core Services (MSXML) is a set of services that allow applications written in JScript, VBScript, and Microsoft development tools to build Windows-native XML-based applications. To manipulate an XML document, you need an XML parser. The parser loads the document into your computer's memory. Once the document is loaded, its data can be manipulated using the DOM. The DOM treats the XML document as a tree. Microsoft's XML parser supports all the necessary functions to traverse the node tree, access the nodes and their attribute values, insert and delete nodes, and convert the node tree back to XML.

Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86)

Microsoft Visual C++ (also known as MSVC) is an integrated development environment (IDE) product engineered by Microsoft for the C, C++, and C++/CLI programming languages

The Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86) installs runtime components of Visual C++ Libraries required to run applications developed with Visual C++ on a computer that does not have Visual C++ 2005 installed.

Microsoft Windows Script 5.6 (9x/Me/NT) -- (install vcrun6 first)

Windows Script is a comprehensive scripting infrastructure for the Microsoft® Windows® platform. Windows Script provides two script engines, Visual Basic® Scripting Edition and Microsoft JScript®, which can be embedded into Windows Applications. It also provides an extensive array of supporting technologies that makes it easier for script users to script Windows applications.

Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 run-time

vbrun60sp6.exe is a self-extracting executable file that installs versions of the Microsoft Visual Basic run-time files required by all applications created with Visual Basic 6.0. The files include the fixes shipped with Service Pack 6 for Visual Basic 6.0.

Visual Basic (VB) is an event driven programming language and associated development environment from Microsoft for its COM programming model.Visual Basic was derived from BASIC and enables the rapid application development (RAD) of graphical user interface (GUI) applications, access to databases using DAO, RDO, or ADO, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects. Scripting languages such as VBA and VBScript are syntactically similar to Visual Basic, but perform differently.

Microsoft Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) for Windows 98 v1.3 (DCOM98.EXE)

Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) is a Microsoft proprietary technology for software components distributed across several networked computers to communicate with each other. DCOM, which originally was called "Network OLE", extends Microsoft's COM, and provides the communication substrate under Microsoft's COM+ application server infrastructure. It has been deprecated in favor of Microsoft .NET. The addition of the "D" to COM was due to extensive use of DCE/RPC – more specifically Microsoft's enhanced version, known as MSRPC.

Microsoft Jet 4.0 Service Pack 8 (SP8) for Windows 95/98/NT 4.0

The Microsoft Jet Database Engine is a database engine on which several Microsoft products were built. A database engine is the underlying component of a database, a collection of information stored on a computer in a systematic way. The first version of Jet was developed in 1992, consisting of three modules which could be used to manipulate a database. JET stands for Joint Engine Technology, sometimes being referred to as Microsoft JET Engine or simply Jet. Microsoft Access and Visual Basic use or have used Jet as their underlying database engine. It has since been superseded, however, first by Microsoft Desktop Engine (MSDE), then later by SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and most recently by SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition, and no longer exists as a component of Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC).

Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) 2.8

Microsoft Data Access Components (commonly abbreviated MDAC) is a framework of interrelated Microsoft technologies that allows programmers a uniform and comprehensive way of developing applications that can access almost any data store. Its components include: ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), OLE DB, and Open Database Connectivity (ODBC). There have been several deprecated components as well, such as the Microsoft Jet Database Engine, MSDASQL (the OLE DB provider for ODBC), and Remote Data Services (RDS). Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) 2.8 contains core Data Access components such as the Microsoft SQL Server OLE DB provider and ODBC driver.