Methods of Deployment

After you have created a setup package, you can deploy your application from any location that's accessible to all its potential users. The Web applications exam requires you to know about the two types of deployment discussed in the following sections.

Deployment via Removable Media

The most common examples of removable media are floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and DVDs. Deployment projects in Visual Studio .NET can be used to create packages divided across multiple files ”each with a size specified by the developer. These small files can then be copied to removable media and distributed to users.

To create a Web setup project for removable media, create a Web setup project and in the project's property pages, change the Package files option to In cabinet file(s) . This action also enables the Cab Size option, where you can specify the size of the cab files depending on your media size.

Web-based Deployment

Web-based deployment is the most popular form of deployment, especially for small applications. With the growth of high-speed Internet connections, this form of deployment is in much higher demand compared to removable media. It offers several advantages over other forms of application deployment, including

• It reduces the costs of media, replication, and distribution.

• Management of software updates is simple. You can program an application to automatically check for updates on the Web, or you can instruct users to download an update package from a Web page.

For Web-based deployment, after the setup files are created, rather than copying them to a removable media, you copy them to a virtual directory on a Web server. You might also want to password-protect the deployment Web site so that only authorized users can download the application. You can then install the application by navigating to the URL of the setup.exe file.