Chapter 6. Deploying Applications

Chapter 5 discussed how to build and package applications. Building and packaging an application is only half of the story, however; you must get your application onto the target computer before it will be of any use to anyone . This chapter examines the various options available to deploy and configure applications on other machines.

In the trivial case, deploying an application can be as simple as copying a single executable file into a directory. In the real world, however, an application often needs to use one or more shared components , needs to be configured for its deployment environment, and should come with a simple technique for removing the application from the computer.

Furthermore, applications may wish to target a number of .NET-supported platforms, including Win32, Windows CE, and BSD, and conceivably any other platform should any non-Microsoft implementations of .NET become available. This chapter covers these topics.