Question

I’ve wrapped up version 1 of my desktop application and it’s ready for deployment.

Just to test things out, I grabbed the contents of the /debug folder and copies that into a folder of the target machine and the application works.

I’m sure this is not the correct way to do this.

I’ve created a Visual Studio Installer project and created that as well. My question is, do I have to set something similar to ASP.Net’s debug=false, when deploying an application?

Thanks for the suggestions.

Answer 1

There are several deployment options of .NET applications. Your approach is often called “xcopy deployment” and is a simple copy of all included files.

Typically you don’t copy the content from the debug folder. Instead you change the “Solutions Configuration” combo in Visual Studio from debug to release, compile the application and copy the files from the “Release” folder instead.

When creating a release build of your application the compiler applies more optimizations to the code to create a more efficient executable.

There are other methods of deployment. Here are some that creates different kinds of installers

• ClickOnce (Right click on your project in solution explorer and choose “Publish”)
• Installer project (creates an MSI installer)
• WiX (creates MSI installers too, is more cumbersome than an installer project, but more flexible
• etc.

The benefit of creating an installer is that it is usually simpler for an end user to run an installer than it is to copy a loose bunch of files. An installer can automatically create an icon on the start menu, make sure the correct version of .NET framework is installed etc.

If you only want to run your application on one or at most a few computers it is probably not worth the extra work of creating an installer.