Summary

Chapters 5 and 6 tackled two of the more difficult areas of modern program development ”packaging and deploying applications and components for distributed systems. This chapter concentrated on strategies for deploying applications on target machines. It discussed options for moving an application onto a target machine, including the very simple approach of downloading an application to a Web browser for execution.

CLI configuration files can be used to modify program execution without requiring the recompilation of the application. The CLI can use these files, for example, to modify assembly version binding. Likewise, applications can use configuration files to perform application-specific configuration options. Configuration files are written in XML, which makes them easier to read and simpler to edit than working in the Registry.

The CLI architecture also addresses the issue of platform portability. Two types of platform portability were discussed in this chapter: the Compact Framework and the Smart Devices Extensions, which target small mobile devices, and the SSCLI, which targets non-Windows platforms such as BSD UNIX.