Deployment options for Visual Studio .NET 2.0 overview

The mainstream solution for deployment provided by Visual Studio 2005 can be found by selecting the Other Project Types template when you click New Project in Visual Studio 2005. The Setup and Deployment submenu gives you six template choices:

• Setup Project
• Web Setup Project
• Merge Module Project
• Setup Wizard
• Cab Project
• Smart Device Cab Project

The Setup Project is the template you'll use most often. You can complete the Setup Project as a standalone, but a recommended alternative is to add the Setup Project to your Solution as another project. This gives you the ability to get the information that the Setup Project needs fast and accurately.

In brief, the Setup Project builds the files you provide to your customers, including but not limited to, Setup.exe and an .msi file (Microsoft Installer file). But you don't write any Visual Basic code to complete this project. You simply select options and provide the information about files that Setup needs in a really extensive collection of dialogs. The key to learning how to build Setup Projects is learning where all the dialog windows are and what they do. That's what we'll take a look at next time.

For example, you'll notice a new button bar above the Solution Explorer window when a Setup project is selected in Visual Studio 2005 Solution Explorer. The six setup buttons (the first is just the standard "properties" button) cover six functional areas where the Setup can be customized to your exact specifications. They are:

• File System Editor
• Registry Editor
• File Types Editor
• User Interface Editor
• Custom Actions Editor
• Launch Conditions Editor

These editors are really "mini-wizards" in their own right and each one is packed with capability. Here's a snapshot of the default User Conditions Editor which also gives you a sort of "flowchart" of the default setup processing:

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You can customize this setup flow and add new dialog based choices from the selection shown in the bottom of the illustration. To make sure that all Windows setups have a little uniformity, however, there are also limits on what you can do here.

Each of the editors have a lot of power just like this one. And this is just part of the customization that you can do for Visual Studio 2005 setups. Remember, we've just taken a brief look at just one part of the main Setup template. Theres a lot more to this template and there are five other templates. Unless you have some really tough requirements, it's likely that you will never need a setup that exceeds the power of what you can do here.