Summary

It's really nice that Visual Studio provides a few different deployment methods for your custom applications. Visual Basic and the larger Visual Studio environment were designed as general-purpose programming systems that allow you to solve almost any development problem facing you or your users. But that doesn't mean that every single feature in the system is applicable to all environments. By having a few different deployment options available, Visual Studio is even more general-purpose that before, and I think that's just great. Sure you have to take five minutes and decide between MSI and ClickOnce. But in most projects, the needs of the users will push you in one direction or the other.

I promised you earlier in the chapter that I would tell you my choice for the Library Project's deployment method. I have decided on a standard Windows Installer deployment with an MSI file. I'll explain some of my reasons for choosing this method in the next section.