creating a stand alone .exe ??

Question

I'm relatively new to the .NET environment, so I would like to ask a pretty elementary question.

I'm using C# to develop an application for a small business.

From what I've read (and may have misunderstood) - the C# compiler creates intermediate bytecode that is linked to the .NET dll's at run time. Is this correct?

When I release this software package to my user, will I also have to insure that his PC has the .NET environment loaded? Is there a way to compile a stand alone .exe?

Thanks!

Ken Barrett · Answer

Thanks so much. I will look through this documentation - I hope you don't mind that if I have further questions if I get back to you? Thanks again!

Alan · Answer

As there's quite a lot to it I'd check out this link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wh45kb66.aspx

Ken Barrett · Answer

Could you elaborate on  Click once? I don't understand.

Alan · Answer

That's right Ken. The whole of the .NET Framework (some 23MB +) needs to be installed on the user's machine for a .NET application to run even if only a small percentage of its capabilities are being used. This is normally pre-installed with Vista but not with earlier versions of Windows. However it's easy (and free) to download the redistributable package and if you use 'Click once' deployment when you publish your application from Visual Studio then when you install it on another machine the .NET framework will be automatically downloaded and installed on that machine if it's not present already. For completeness I'll mention that there are some very expensive third party linkers (such as the one I've linked to below) which can create a 'stand alone' .NET executable but with hard disk space being dirt cheap nowadays and .NET applications becoming more commonplace I personally don't think they're worth the money: http://www.remotesoft.com/linker/