Chapter 17: Deploying Your .NET Application

Copying Files from Your Development Environment to Your Production Environment

It is safe to assume that you have installed software onto a Windows platform. After all, your Microsoft .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET (VS .NET) toolset required a lengthy installation. The Fujitsu NetCOBOL for .NET software required that you go through an installation procedure as well. Perhaps you have installed other software packages (e.g., Microsoft Office, SQL Server, Adobe Acrobat Reader, and so on). Some of your installations were initiated by simply putting in a CD ROM. Others required that you locate and click a Setup.exe program.

In each case, as you have installed software, you were actually completing the final steps of a deployment: a software deployment process. In this chapter, you will explore several of the steps you need to take to deploy your own .NET software that you have developed.

I start off the chapter by discussing several of the choices available to you as you plan for and design your application's deployment. From there, you will explore Microsoft Windows Installer 2.0 (Windows Installer) software as it is exposed in the VS .NET IDE. Using Windows Installer, you will learn how to easily deploy .NET Windows and Web applications. The last portion of the chapter covers the manual approach to a .NET deployment.

Note  

I use the term "deployment" to refer to copying files from a development, testing, or staging environment to a production environment that is exposed to targeted end users. Some of you may be more familiar with phrases such as "implement to production," "promote to production," or "distribute to production." No matter which terms you use to describe this process, the concept is basically the same.