Chapter 6. Deploying Applications

Chapter 5 discussed how to build and package applications. Building and packaging an application is only half of the story, however; you must get your application onto the target computer before it will be of any use to anyone. This chapter examines the various options available to deploy and configure applications on other machines.

In the trivial case, deploying an application can be as simple as copying a single executable file into a directory. In the real world, however, an application often needs to use one or more shared components, needs to be configured for its deployment environment, and should come with a simple technique for removing the application from the computer.

Furthermore, applications may wish to target a number of .NET-supported platforms, including Win32, Windows CE, and BSD, and conceivably any other platform should any non-Microsoft implementations of .NET become available. This chapter covers these topics.