deployment help

zecodela

hi, anyone can give me some tutorials about the deployment tools in Visual Studio .NET? i seems able to do more than my current understanding. would anyone give me some help on that? thanks, jim

Daniel Turini

Don't worry, you are not alone. While there are some tutorials on MSDN, and VS.NET is a damn good environment, the VS.NET deployment tools suck (they are confuse, unstable and unreliable), that's why you are lost. I'm yet to find a good deployment solution for .NET. You can do it on anything you choose - from .bat to .net - A customer

zecodela

ha! my boss requested me to make a single installer to deploy a db app. developed in both C# and C++. most difficult part is installing the mysql database. i am using some batch file to start the database service stuffs... quite trouble to deal with.

sumeat

Hi, I recently had to build a installation program to install my application and I tried to do it using the "Deployment" project in Visual Studio.Net. After much research and help from the folks on this message board I was able to build the installation package. There are 2 things to be done: 1. Create a new project of type "Deployment" and add all the components of your application to this project. You can specify the folders they need to be on the target computer, the icons/shortcuts on the desktop, the item in the Start->Program Menu, etc. On building this project it will generate a .wsi file, a setup.exe along with other files. All the files generated in the Debug directory constitute the installation package. The above package will run perfectly on any computer as long as it has .NET framework installed on it. If not then you have do the second thing. 2. Download the BootStrapper sample from the following link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=BF253CFD-1EFC-4FC5-BA7E-6A6F21403495&displaylang=en Its in unmanaged C++. Build it and it will generate a setup.exe. It also has a settings.ini file. Copy the setup.exe and settings.ini into a folder, say, myfolder. Then copy the .wsi generated in step 1 above into myfolder. Then copy the dotnetfx.exe (the .net framework installer) into myfolder. The dotnetfx.exe can be downloaded from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D7158DEE-A83F-4E21-B05A-009D06457787&displaylang=en All files in myfolder now constitute your new installation package. This installation will first check if .NET is installed or not on the target computer, if not, then it will silently install it and then it will install your application. I hope this helps. Suhas

zecodela

oh! really thanks! i have tried what you said... but, i need to do a bit more such as install mysql, startup mysql service... i am thinking to make a executable to do this and use a batch file to run it. let me make such a "not so elegrant solution" first and see if my boss accept. otherwise, ask him to buy a deployment tools. indeed, i don't know why detecting framework existance is so important but not included in the deployment tools.