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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T01:05:45+00:00

I’ve built against the release profile and this creates an executable build within the

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I’ve built against the release profile and this creates an executable build within the release directory in my project.

How do I best distribute to clients from this executable? There are a lot of files within this folder which don’t appear when installed through the installer, such as the mainifest and one called application.exe.xml (which is confusing when Windows hides the extension in Windows Explorer).

Are these all necessary? Can I just send the executable? Or will I need to send with all the files? Is there a way to build without all these files?

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  1. Editorial Team

    You must send the EXE file and any DLL file that you reference locally. If you use COM references and the like, you need to register them during the installation. The same thing for the GAC I think, but I haven’t used that for stand-alone applications myself.

    The application.exe.config file contains the application settings (a copy of app.config). If you don’t use settings or the user doesn’t typically care about them, you can omit the file, and it will use the default values you built the application with.

    The vshost files are not needed (if you have them). They are used by Visual Studio’s debugger. The .pdb files contain debug data used to facilitate DLL file to source matching. Unless you plan on attaching a debugger to the application, there is no point sending those.

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