Visual Studio Tools for Office: Using Visual Basic 2005 with Excel, Word, Outlook, and InfoPath

20. Deployment

After you have built a great VSTO solution by customizing a Word document or Excel spreadsheet, you have to get the final bits of the code to your users somehow. But how? There are two broad classifications of deployment scenarios: local install and network install. Each has pros and cons.

Consider how this problem has traditionally been solved in the application programming world. In the traditional rich client or thick client application, all the application logic is stored in files that somehow get copied to the local machine. There might be a single .exe file, orthe solution might have a number of .dll files associated with it that also need to be installed. When installing a thick client application, often the administrator ...