Professional VB 2005 with .NET 3.0 (Programmer to Programmer)

Overview

One of the significant advantages of .NET over its predecessor, COM, is dramatically improved deployment. NET offers a host of deployment options that were not available for older, COM-based software. These options completely change the economics of deployment. The changes are so important that they can even alter the preferred architecture for a system written in .NET.

Deployment encompasses many activities required to place an application into a production environment. Setting up databases, placing software in appropriate directories on servers, and configuring options for a particular installation are some of the actions that fall under the deployment category. Deployment also includes handling of changes and upgrades to the application.

This chapter discusses the major deployment options for .NET applications. The previous chapter on assemblies should be considered a prerequisite for this chapter, as assemblies are the basic unit of deployment.

First you’ll look at some of the problems that can occur when you deploy applications, along with a number of terms that are used when talking about application deployment. Next is a look at how .NET addresses many of these deployment issues. The remainder of the chapter covers the following:

• Creating deployment projects in Visual Studio 2005, which enable initial installation of applications

• Deployment of the .NET Framework itself on systems where it does not already reside

• Updating applications on servers, including components and ASP.NET applications

• Installing and updating Windows Forms applications on client machines with ClickOnce, Microsoft’s proprietary deployment technology