I respect everyone who answered but I'm afraid I already acted upon @andred advice and it worked for me. After facing many faliures and error messages finally I'm able to run both versions of PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 and two versions of Apache and two versions of mysql because there was an issue related VC 6 and VC 9 there were old binaries compiled in VC 6 and new are in VC 9 and still (last time when I checked) apache.org doesn't compile apache in the same version which is used by PHP.net so bunch of thanks to GOD and all of you for your support.
BTW I use windows. – Apr 22 '13 at 10:12. The intuitive choice is the correct one, install the latest version.
Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime 8.0 Service Pack 1 Download
These installers also deploy a publisher policy file that redirects a program that asks for any old version to the new version. Which is the basic mechanism by which they can get critical bug fixes or security updates to be activated. Or to put it a bit more bluntly, publisher policies are a counter-measure against DLL Hell countermeasures. They work well, I never heard anybody ever complain about a versioning problem with these DLLs. The more typical DLL Hell problem is overwriting a DLL with an older version, that cannot happen with these side-by-side DLLs. Deploying an old version when your program asks for a new one (look in the.manifest file) is a fail-whale. Microsoft Visual C 2008 Redistributable Package (x86) Date published: This is the one you need for 32-bit (x86) applications compiled with Visual Studio 2008.
Microsoft Visual C 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86) Date published: 9/16/2008 Same as above, except that it includes updates from Service Pack 1 (SP1). Use this one instead of the one above if you compiled the app with Visual Studio 2008 with Service Pack 1. The version of Visual Studio and the service pack level can be checked from Help - About inside of the IDE.
Microsoft Visual C 2008 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package ATL Security Update Date published: 9/29/2010 4. Microsoft Visual C 2008 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package MFC Security Update Date published: 6/7/2011 I can't tell from the name whether these two are just optional updates to the above redistributable package, or whether they include the full redistributable package plus the optional update. Either way, you only need them if your application is written in ATL or MFC.
If this is all too confusing, note that you don't even need to use any of these redistributable installers when distributing your application. You can just place the required runtime DLLs in the same folder as your executable and it will run just fine. The correct versions of the required libraries are copied to your computer as part of your Visual Studio installation. You'll find them in the following directory: Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0 VC redist x86. The only thing that has begun to complicate this recommendation is the Universal CRT, shipped with VS 2015, which actually is a system component and serviced by Windows Update in Windows 10.
But that post-dates this answer by a few years. And app-local deployment is still supported for the Universal CRT, and may be a good idea if you need to support downlevel operating systems and don't want to rely on the update package having been installed (or having to ship the update installer yourself). – Feb 14 at 14:22.