Is it required to ship a windows core dll?

Question

I have a library that is using some windows API's from user32.dll and gdi32.dll. Since these are standard windows libraries, I do not think that these would be required to be shipped with my library and all windows computers should have them already right?

My code is windows specific, so the API will not be called from a non-windows build.

Answer 1

You don't ship those libs.

As a general mode-of-distribution, if there is something the requires shipping it will have a redist package (the VC++ runtime, the .NET runtime, etc). The libs you mentioned are core-OS, and will always be present on the target machine Windows OS.

Note: If there are specific features only available in core OS libraries starting with a specific OS release, they will be noted in the feature documentation. For example, OS-supported public API's for condition variable primitives were not available until starting with a specific release of the OS, and the documentation notes this, sometimes verbosely. The feature I just mentioned, for example, has:

Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP : Condition variables are not supported.

noted in the general topic section of the documentation, and things like:

Minimum supported client Windows Vista

Minimum supported server Windows Server 2008

in the API-specific documentation. Check your features and APIs if there is any doubt as to whether a feature you're using is going to be available on your target-platform(s).