Throughout the book we've been making the assumption that the Windows Forms application code might be deployed using no-touch deployment . No-touch deployment is a feature of the .NET runtime whereby .NET assemblies are downloaded to a client workstation automatically, and then executed.
Much is made of the XCOPY deployment capabilities of .NET, but the reality is that XCOPY deployment still requires a manual copy process to get the code to the client. No-touch deployment is more powerful, because it uses an automatic copy process to get the code to the client. Installing or updating an application through no-touch deployment is as simple as copying the EXE file and its related DLLs to a virtual directory on a web server!
Tip | The benefits of no-touch deployment are tremendous. Many business applications are created as browser-based applications because of the sheer cost of deploying Windows applications. With no- touch deployment, the cost of deploying a Windows application is the same as deploying a web application ”which means that we can choose between Windows Forms and Web Forms based on features and user requirements, rather than on deployment cost issues. |