Summary

Deployment is often the least considered element of an enterprise application. After spending months designing and developing the application, there is often little time remaining for putting together a well-planned setup application. From the user's perspective, smooth deployment is important. Just as books are judged by their cover, a good or bad setup program can set the tone for the rest of the user 's experience.

Visual Studio provides tools for building smarter and easier-to-use setup programs, capable of detecting the environment they are targeting and selectively installing pieces of an application accordingly .

The following appendixes provide additional reference material for building the IssueTracker sample application as well as other .NET applications. Appendix A, "Building the IssueTracker Database," presents the SQL table create scripts necessary to build the IssueTracker sample database. Appendix B, "Understanding the IssueTracker Object Map," presents a diagram that outlines the business objects and collections referenced by the IssueTracker application. Appendix C, "Using String Format Specifiers," is a useful reference for formatting various data objects as strings. Appendix D, "Using XSLT Functions" is another useful reference that presents the most common XSLT instructions.