Introduction

The final stage in developing an application is preparing it for deployment. The first thing a user sees of your application is the installation. If problems arise during installation, the customer already has a negative perception of your application. Thankfully, deploying your application in Visual Basic .NET is simpler. How many times have you heard customers say they installed your application and now something else doesn t work? Windows applications can get complicated with many DLLs needed and so many versions available. The .NET Framework will allow different versions of a component on the same computer. You don t have to worry about registration problems anymore.

Packaging your application can be as simple as copying all of the files into a common directory. Your application will be comprised of one or more assemblies. Because assemblies are self-describing, you don t need to do much. You don t have to worry about all the correct Registry entries being set and whether or not a version of your component(s) already exists on the computer. If you want your application to set up the Start menu or maybe even create an icon in the Quick Launch toolbar, you may want to package your application to be installed by the Windows Installer.

The complexity of configuring your application varies. If you use private assemblies, all you have to do is copy all the files to the same directory. If you want to use public assemblies or use different directories for some assemblies, you will need to create...