Chapter 48. Packaging And Deployment
WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?
Creating installers for your projects
Customizing the installation process
Verifying the presence of application prerequisites
Installing Windows Services
Deploying projects over the web with ClickOnce
Updating ClickOnce projects
One area of software development that is often overlooked is how to deploy the application. Building an installer is a simple process and can transform your application from an amateur utility to a professional tool. This chapter looks at how you can build a Windows Installer for any type of .NET application.
Visual Studio 2010 also includes support for a ClickOnce deployment, which can be used to build applications that can be dynamically updated. This is particularly important for rich client applications that periodically need updating, because it solves the problem of how to roll out those updates.
WINDOWS INSTALLERS
Windows Installer has been a standard part of Windows since Windows 2000. It is the component that manages the installation, maintenance, and removal of software packages. Visual Studio 2010 comes with a rich user interface for building installation packages for a variety of different applications that target the Windows Installer infrastructure. This chapter demonstrates building installers for desktop applications and windows services. The next chapter contains information about packaging and deploying web applications.
Building an Installer
To build an installer with Visual Studio 2010, ...
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