Deploy .NET (C#) exe application on desktops

Question

I develop application in C# with MSVC 2010 Express, with Forms/WPF/etc.

Application consist of some private assemblies (maybe DLLs) and .exe file. It uses .NET 4 fea

Answer 1

Yes, you should point them to install .NET. Otherwise it won't be possible for them to run your application.

Answer 2

There is click-once deploy from microsoft. It automates most of the tasks, including making sure you have the right .Net version and updating the app if a new version of your app is available.

Answer 3

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324733

Answer 4

when you package you application,you shoud include the .NET Framework

Answer 5

Check out Inno : http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php It's free and pretty simple.

OTOH I've seen QTTabBar using it in its' codebase and it was literally one single text file (setup.iss). Let me see if I can find URL to their SourceForge page so you can see the source and the build ... There is it http://qttabbar.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/qttabbar/trunk/Install/ If you grab the source tree you can probably re-fit it for your app in a day.

Answer 6

We try to keep deployment as simple as possible, and one of the things we do is to ensure our application is just a single executable, no support files needed.

We several steps to get there:

1. Make sure all dependent resource files are stored in embedded resources where possible, and not on disk
2. Use ILmerge to link all assemblies into a single executable
3. Optional - obfuscate the assembly
4. Optional - If some parts cannot be ILMerged or obfuscated, forcing us to have multiple files, we use Xenocode's PostBuild to link all files into a single executable. Xenocode offers a virtual filesystem to do this. This also allows framework embedding so your app will run on a clean Windows install - no dependencies need to be installed :-)
5. Wrap the single executable into an msi installer using WiX
6. Wrap the single executable into click once deployment. For this we also use a little stub launcher executable which starts the main application, allowing us to reuse the same main application executable
7. Create a zip file of just the single file executable for manual installation.

We the following on our downloads site:

1. the MSI installer - we prefer people to use this one
2. A zip file with the Xenocoded (single file) executable
3. A zip file with the Xenocoded (single file) executable including the .NET Framework