MFC MBCS DLL Add-on

MFC libraries (DLLs) for multibyte character encoding (MBCS) are no longer included in Visual Studio, but are available as an add-on that you can download and install on any machine that has Visual Studio Professional, Visual Studio Premium, or Visual Studio Ultimate. (In Visual Studio, MFC must be enabled.) The installation requires about 440 MB of disk space and includes the English (United States) and localized versions of the DLLs.

You need this download in order to build an MFC project that has the Character Set property set to Use Multi-Byte Character Set or Not Set.

To download, go to the Multibyte MFC Library for Visual Studio 2013 page, or the Multibyte MFC Library for Visual Studio 2015 page on the Microsoft Download Center, as appropriate.

After the MBCS DLLs are installed, if you uninstall or repair Visual Studio, they are also uninstalled or repaired. However, if you just disable MFC, the MBCS DLLs remain on your system. If you uninstall or repair just the MBCS DLLs, Visual Studio is not modified.

Note

The Redistributable Packages still include the MFC MBCS DLLs. No additional steps are required to redistribute them to your customers.

See Also

Concepts

MFC Library Versions