deployment with .net studio 2003 standard

Question

Am hoping someone out there will be able to give me some concise advice. I have written an application on vb.net studio, standard edition and am trying to package it for deployment. It is a fairly straigt forward windows form that merely simplifies a number of long tedious trigononmetry based engineering formulas so should not need any addons. No where can I find anything of any help on the microsoft web site, I simply want to package the thing in a setup file or cab format, so that it can be distributed on other computers. Can this be done on the standard program, and if so, how? Will the recipient computers have to have the .net framework 1.1 installed? Is there any easy way to do this? Hope someone out there can help me, I am feeling this microsoft program is just an uphill battle from day one, the msdn help files seem to be 1.6g ig of useless space?

Answer 1

The client machines NEEDS the .net framework that your app was written with. You can get the resistibutable here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=262D25E3-F589-4842-8157-034D1E7CF3A3&displaylang=en Install this and you should just be able to copy the exe onto the client and it will run. You can deploy it if you wish to have the add/remove program stuff. To do this in VS.Pro (sorry have not seen standard so it might not help). Start a new project and select setup and deployment and pick setup project. Then add the built exe you wish to deploy, you can also add registry and shortcust stuff with this windows installer project. The only thing I could not get it to do was to install the framework (something to do with windows installer using it!?!). We had to switch to install sheild and write a proper setup to bundle it in. Cheers, Si