Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET

Chapter 15. Web Deployment

So far, this book has been targeted at using WinForms to build applications, forms, and controls. The traditional means of deploying such code is via a setup application, or more recently, a Microsoft Installer (MSI) file. The problem is getting the setup executed on the desired client machines and, after that's done, keeping the clients up-to-date.

Web applications, on the other hand, offer a much more primitive application and control implementation framework, but a much simpler deployment model. All that's needed to keep a Web client user up-to-date is to keep the files on the Web server itself up-to-date. WinForms supports this model not only for controls hosted on a Web page but also for WinForms applications ...