Chapter 1: Introduction

Welcome to Deploying .NET Framework-based Applications. With the introduction of the .NET Framework, Microsoft created a new environment for developing applications. If your organization is developing .NET-Framework based applications, you face the challenge of deploying those applications efficiently and reliably throughout your environment. If you are experienced in the area of deployment, some of the challenges will be familiar. However, there are a number of new technologies in .NET Framework - based applications, and therefore several considerations that are unique to deploying them. This guide will give you the information necessary to plan and implement the effective deployment of your Framework-based applications. Should you have any questions, comments, or suggestions on this material you can send feedback to: <[e-mail]>.

Note

In this guide we will generally refer to .NET Framework-based applications as Framework Applications.

Who Should Read This Guide

This guide is targeted at people within an organization responsible for deploying Framework applications. In some organizations those individuals will be specialists, but in many others, application deployment will form part of a larger role in either infrastructure or application development. As application deployment spans these two areas, we have made no significant assumptions for the prerequisite knowledge required by the reader. A developer with some infrastructure knowledge should gain benefit from this guide, as should an infrastructure professional with some knowledge of developer issues. The main focus of this guide is, of course, the deployment of applications, but where other issues (such as application design) have an impact on deployment, we discuss those issues. For example, although this guide does not discuss testing methodology, it does include recommendations for deploying applications from development computers to test environments. Similarly, this guide also provides recommendations for deploying to staging servers as part of the release process.

This guide assumes that you are using a Windows Server 2003 server environment, and that you are deploying applications for the Framework v1.1. However, much of the information contained in this guide is also relevant to applications built on version 1.0 of the Framework.

Application deployment can occur on any scale, from single machine deployment to hundreds of thousands of computers. For this reason we have made no assumptions as to the size of organization involved, or the nature of the specific applications deployed. You should therefore read this guide if you are responsible for deploying .NET Framework-based applications of any size, with any performance or scalability requirements.