I'm using the latest Visual Studio 2010, with C# 3.5 and my project is working fine on my machine.
I'm using SQLite for the database, and it's just a little .db file.
What's the best way for me to package this simple little application?
What is the preferred way to create a project that's setup for deployment?
I'm assuming that your app is to be run on a desktop - if that's not the case you'll have to clarify.
You need to add a setup & deployment project to your solution and configure it to install the build output from your application as well as whatever content you want (ie: your .db file) onto the end user's machine.
The process is fairly straightforward and there are TONS of tutorials online -- Google is your friend for nitty gritty details.
You can always use NSIS (from Nullsoft). Free and really a pleasure to work with. It comes with samples and tutorials and you will find a lot of info on Google.
You can deploy your app in a few minutes if you don't want too much installer customization.
Related
I've written an MVC core app. The next step is to wrap it in an MSI and distribute it to clients. The problem is this: I can't seem to find any built in way capture all the content files and dll's automatically and wrap them in an MSI. I've tried so far windows installer and wix (heat, to be precise) and both of them doesn't seem to have a built in way to work with .net core. Did Microsoft just decided it's not important enough or am I missing something important? I could try to put all the output and all the dependencies, file by file, but that would be hell to maintain, with the new Nuget approach there are many many dll's required for a project, together with all the content it becomes enormous. Any help would be appreciated
I'm still adjusting to this "modern" world and part of me wonders why you'd want to package a .NET core app as an MSI. I'd think you'd be running it in a docker container or windows server app (appx) in the "cloud" or on nano server which doesn't even support MSI. For actual windows servers I'd assume regular old .NET. (Which I still fondly love.)
That said, I have an open source program called IsWiX (CodePlex) and have a very simple pattern for creating ASP.NET website installers (see video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgDf1kv8a-4) and I'd be willing to work with you to come up with a similiar story for asp.net-core mvc apps.
From what I read, .net core apps also have msbuild publish profile support. That is what I use to create the model from which I author my installers. From there I just drag drop my files into IsWiX and let it author all the XML for me.
FWIW website installers have always had a lot of files. Even before nuget and npm a website developer might add a few thousand files to their project just by adding say Infragistics. I once worked on an installer with over 300,000 files. Yikes! I always wished we had a way of just creating an uncompresssed archive of this stuff and IIS could see if as a directory but to my knowledge that never happened.
The MSI world is a declarative world where we need to explicitly list each of those files. Web developers live in a world where they just say "publish" and don't care about those details. That is the gap that I try to bridge with IsWiX.
I want to build a setup file that contain windows form application that is connected to sql server how can I do that? I want to put the .net framework and sql server in the setup package how can I do that? do I need sql server or sql express in this case? I want to create the database in the installation process how can I do this? I want to check If the requirements are already installed how can I do this? hw can I improve the security of the program from stealing?? please help thanks
note my English language not good enough Smile | :)
That is a lot more than one question, and not easy to answer all at once. Anyway, assuming you're using Visual Studio 2012, you can try creating a new Install Shield project (below).
(It might be easier to help you once you've tried something, and have got a more specific question/problem)
For my projects I use Inno Setup. It lets you customize all aspects of the installer - add/remove different screens, set conditions for installing different files, for example you can check out whether SQL server is installed and install it only if it is not through scripting. Take a look at the FAQ page for more information about the features this tool offers.
There's also a sample Inno Setup file at CodePlex, that should get the job done. I haven't tried it though, so I cannot guarantee whether it works fine or not.
If you want to have installer for tomorrow, than good choice will be WIX (http://wix.sourceforge.net/). It is easy to understand and have a possibility of checking installed frameworks and OS version.
If you wish to have Framework msi installer inside yours, than you can check Wix Bootsrapper. But as far as I know it has poor flexibility to setup install steps. For this propose you can combine Wix with other for example NSIS. You can create application installer by using Wix and Bootsrapper application, which will contains your application MSI and Framework MSI, by using NSIS.
To create database during installation you also can use WIX. You need to create database generation plan, which will contain queries for creating database. This generation plan can be executed as part of the installation process (http://wix.tramontana.co.hu/tutorial/sql/creating-a-database). It is good choice wile you don't need additional information from user. In other case you will need to create custom UI.
From my experience with built in Visual Studio install tools, they're all horrible.
I highly recommend Advanced Installer. It's a very powerful tool to create installers and patches for your software. It should have all the features you need in the free version, including checking for prerequisites such as .NET Framework on the user's machine, and installing things when needed.
I am using visual studio web project to install my web application and do some customization like modifying connection string in web.config file during install time.
Now, My requirement is to create a patch for the web application so that next time the web installer only the changed files.
Is there is any one to do it using visualk studio 2010 ide or any other way.We can't use third party products like Installshield,wix,innosetup etc.
Please suggest.
Visual Studio doesn't support patches for setup projects. It supports only major upgrades.
If you really don't want to use other setup authoring tools, you can try creating the patch manually. You can read more about this here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa370578(VS.85).aspx
But it won't be easy.
If it is just Web project, I would recommend re-deploy instead of patching. Meaning you just deploy new version of site, above the previous one.
Except some really comprehensive case that strategy works all the time. I use simple xcopy deploy for all my projects.
You can write a mini C# app to do it. You can have the list of assembly files in a configuration. On loading of the app, it checks the timestamp difference between server and client files. On finding the change, the mini app pushes the changes file.
Hope, it will resolve your issue
There may be better suited solutins to deply websites than using an installer. For one, there's Web Deploy.
It's main purpose is deploying web applications to IIS and it allows you to modify key configuration values through a simple UI.
Web Deploy works with deployment packages; a big zip containing your application and some meta data to help install it. On deployment it will diff the deployed site with the data in the deployment package to update existing files, add new ones and remove obsolete files.
You can build deployment packages directly from Visual Studio and/or from MSBuild, using your favorite build server.
Web Deploy works really well when you need to deploy often or when you have to delegate deployment to IT staff.
Customizing Web Deployment package is a bit tedious though, you may find a blog post I wrote about this useful.
For simpler situations, I recommend good version control practices and xcopy deployment.
If you tag what you deploy to your server, you can zip up the changed files since last deployment and copy those to your server.
I have an application depending on the Google Data API SDK (which are .dll's).
When I publish the application (Debug > Build Solution), my EXE-file only works on another computer when I copy the references in the same directory which I have included in my Visual Studio project.
The application is querying my Google Calendar for the current event, so I want to be able to run it from a memory stick.
Is there a solution so I can include those DLL's in one single EXE (make it kind of portable?).
Thank you so much!
You could potentially use ilmerge to do this. However, I don't know what the ramifications of this are in terms of licensing, particularly if you're going to distribute the app.
I would personally vote for keeping them separate, and just deploying them next to each other (whether in an installer or on a memory stick).
Most of the libraries Google provides are open-source and hosted on Google Code. This means you can download the source code and include it in the same project as the .exe project. That eliminates the need to have references to other dlls.
Here is the link to the .Net Google Code project. You'll need svn to check out the latest source code. The svn command is here:
svn checkout http://google-gdata.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ google-gdata-read-only
I am wondering how can I make a setup project for each of these projects
Asp.net mvc 2.0
C# cmd line
Application C# web-service
I am using VS 2010 ultimate and I know that I can use the the free edition of install shield for at least the cmd line application. I am not sure about the other 2. I also know about the setup project that you can use. I just need a lot more than the basics so I am not sure how to make either one do these things.
So here is some criteria that each of my setups should be able to do.
Asp.net mvc 2.0 criteria
free (I really don't want to pay for an installer - you can list them just so I am aware of them).
Terms of service
Ability to force a user to setup certain settings. Like connection string, smtp settings. So they should be able to type it in through the setup wizard and the web.config should be updated based on this.
When it installs the stuff it should all be .dlls for all the C# code.
C# cmd line criteria
All criteria as above
I am not sure if this has to be done in the code but I have a html file that contains a template for a message. The path to this file is in the web.config so I a person needs to set this path each time they install it. I tried to do this in code but I could not figure out how to make it find the right path in development and the right path in production. It seems like If you run in VS the path is different.
Web-service
Pretty much everything I covered in the first 2 ones.
Thanks
If I were you, I would choose WiX as a platform for your installers for all these applications. Some reasoning behind this:
it is XML-based, that is, friendly to source control, diffing and merging
it has rich set of tools for most of scenarios you might need (harvesting lots of files, creating upgrades and patches, creating multi-lingual installs, etc.)
it is free and open source
it is production-ready (at least, version 3.0 - later versions are still in beta)
it is used by Microsoft to create installations for such products like MS Office
it has rich community at wix-users#lists.sourceforge.net and StackOverflow
it integrates into the VS like a charm
it is friendly to build engines like NAnt and MSBuild
VS setup project is not my choice because:
it is very limited in set of features-
it encourages bad practices like Installer classes
finally, it was retired by Microsoft
I'm not familiar with InstallShield Limited edition, though.
Hope this overview will help you finding the best option for your case.