Professional Visual Basic® 2008

Chapter 24. Deployment

Applications developed with the .NET Framework have a host of deployment options that were not available for older, COM-based software. These options completely change the economics of deployment. The changes are so important that they can even alter the preferred architecture for a system written in .NET.

Deployment encompasses many activities required to place an application into a production environment, including setting up databases, placing software in appropriate directories on servers, and configuring options for a particular installation. Deployment also includes handling changes and upgrades to the application.

This chapter covers the major deployment options for .NET applications. The previous chapter on assemblies should be considered a prerequisite for this chapter, as assemblies are the basic unit of deployment.

First, you'll look at some of the problems that can occur when you deploy applications, along with a number of terms that are used when talking about application deployment. Then you'll learn how .NET addresses many of these deployment issues. The remainder of the chapter covers the following:

• Creating deployment projects in Visual Studio 2008 that enable initial installation of applications

• Deployment of the .NET Framework itself on systems where it does not already reside

• Updating applications on servers, including components and ASP.NET applications

• Installing and updating Windows Forms applications on client machines with ClickOnce

Deployment ...