Visual Basic 2015 Unleashed

Deploy Without PIAs

When deploying applications that reference a COM library, you must include in your distribution the PIAs. In our example, the PIA is Interop.WMPLib.dll. You can avoid including PIAs in your distributions, although you need to reference those assemblies. This is possible because Visual Studio can embed in your executable only the types that you effectively use from the referenced assembly. This prevents you from needing to include the assembly itself in the build output and, consequently, in the deployment process. For our sample scenario about including the Windows Media Player component, you could write a small application that has the name of a media file provided by the user and that then launches WMP. Listing 3.8 accomplishes ...