Chapter 1: Deployment Fundamentals

Overview

Today's Information Technology (IT) professionals are responsible for managing a multitude of different platforms, operating systems, networks, application development tools, and third party components . Implementing and maintaining custom software and vertical market products you develop in this environment is more complex than ever despite running in the most advance environment since the dawn of the personal computing era. A strong understanding of deployment fundamentals can reduce the problems you introduce into the process and increase your ability to react to unexpected situations and resolve inevitable problems.

We all make critical mistakes in deployments and with each deployment we continue to learn from mistakes we make. We have worked with a number of developers over the years , both in our jobs and through interactions on the peer-to-peer support forums, who made mistakes in deployments as well. The key is to learn from both the mistakes and the successes. Each deployment has both common and new challenges. Knowing the fundamentals, anticipating the problems you can run into, having the solutions banked in your knowledge base, and setting your customer ‚ s expectations for the steps to come both simplify the process and add to your reputation as a professional who knows how to get the job done.

This chapter provides some of the basics, starting with a description of deployment. We explain why the actual installation of the solution is only part of the deployment process, why getting the deployment process right is so important, and why you need an installation package. We discuss what your minimal needs are in deploying a Visual FoxPro application, and what parts of Visual FoxPro and Microsoft provided code can be redistributed to your clients .