Using NetRun

Once NetRun is installed on a client workstation, no further work is required on that machine. To deploy an application to the client, all we need to do is copy the application's EXE and associated DLLs to a directory on our web server.

Note 

If our application uses a .config file, we'll also need to rename that file to have a .remoteconfig extension.

For instance, we can deploy our PTWin client application for use by NetRun . Create a directory on the web server beneath inetpub\ wwwroot , name it Apps , and then create a PTWin directory beneath that. Then copy all files from PTWin\bin to our new inetpub\wwwroot\Apps\PTWin directory on the web server, and rename PTWin.exe.config to PTWin.exe.remoteconfig .

The deployment of our application is now complete! Return to the client workstation, and launch the program using NetRun as follows :

  > netrun http://server/apps/ptwin/ptwin.exe  

The PTWin application should appear after a brief pause (remember that it had to be downloaded from the server first), but it should run normally.

If we want to deploy a new version of the PTWin application, all we need to do is copy the new version into the web directory on our server. Client applications will automatically download the new versions of the EXE and DLLs the next time the application is launched.

The version-checking mechanism used by no-touch deployment in .NET is the same file date/time check that's used to determine whether a web page is current in the Internet Explorer cache. In other words, the version of each assembly is immaterial it's the file date/time that triggers a client to download a new version of each file.