Programming Visual Basic 2008

Chapter 25. Deployment

Although Aesop lived thousands of years ago, he has much to tell us about software development. His story of the boy who cried wolf is a perfect example. It concerns a young shepherd boy who tricks nearby villagers repeatedly by shouting, “Wolf!” when no such danger exists. The trick was good for a few laughs, but then the boy found out the consequences of his actions: he couldn’t get any villagers to buy his sheep and he had to eat them all by himself. Yuck! If only the boy had learned how to properly deploy his flock into the hands of the villagers instead of making up wolf-based lies, he would never have come to such a tragic end.

So, Aesop clearly shows us how important deployment is. And Microsoft took this lesson to heart by including several different options right in Visual Studio that let you install your compiled applications and supporting files onto a target workstation. We’ll look at these methods in this chapter, and use one of the methods to build a “setup” program for the Library Project.

What’s Involved in Deployment?

In the days before Microsoft Windows, deployment wasn’t so difficult. Many programs were nothing more than an MS-DOS executable file, with perhaps one or two supporting data and help files. That was it. Once you copied those files into some folder on the client workstation and updated the PATH environment variable, you were done.

Microsoft Windows applications (and large and complex MS-DOS programs) were not as easy to install. They ...