Programming WPF, 2nd Edition

Application Deployment

For the purposes of demonstration, let's build something vital for procrastinators the world over: an application to generate excuses. The application was started with the "Windows Application (WPF)" project template in Visual Studio 2005 and was implemented with some very simple code. When you run it, it gives you an excuse from its vast database, as shown in Figure 2-4.

Figure 2-4. A WPF excuse-generation application

Simple Publishing

For anyone to use this wonderful application, it must be published. The simplest way to publish your WPF application is by right-clicking on the project in the Solution Explorer and choosing the Publish option, which will bring up the first page of the Publish Wizard (shown in Figure 2-5).

Figure 2-5. Publish Wizard publish location

Figure 2-5 asks you to choose where you'd like to deploy your application, including to the disk, to a network share, to an FTP server, or to a web site. By default, the Publish Wizard will assume you want to publish to the Publish subdirectory of your project directory. Clicking the Next button yields Figure 2-6.

Figure 2-6. Publish Wizard installation options

Because we've chosen to publish to something besides ...