Microsoft® Visual C#® .NET 2003 Kick Start

Deploying Your Applications

When you create a .NET application, you can often copy it to another .NET machine simply by copying the .EXE file. On the other hand, installing most real applications isn't that simple; there's usually much more to install than just an .EXE file. You might want to add items to the machine's Start menu, and so on. The best way to install C# applications on .NET machines is to create a Microsoft Installer (.MSI) file, and we'll see how to create such a file here.

To install an application, all you have to do is to copy the .MSI file to the target machine and double-click it. The Microsoft Windows Installer will do the rest, as we'll see. You can also use a setup.exe program, which we'll also create here, to run the ...