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Distribution Overview
If you come from a background where you have developed Visual Basic 6.0 applications, you will be familiar with the Packaging and Deployment Wizard that was available with the Enterprise editions of the product, and may even have used these tools to create script-based setups for your own applications.
It probably only took one or two attempts at distributing reporting applications with the Packaging and Deployment Wizard, to tell that there had to be a better way of doing things. To start with, it was difficult to determine which run-time files needed to be included with your report, and then once those same files were identified, you had to ensure that the files didn't conflict with or overwrite any other files on the target system.Developers often added every Crystal-related file they could find to the setup (just to be on the safe side) but the size of the setup program and distributable files would blow out of proportion to the functionality Crystal Reports provided. Clearly, there had to be a better way of distributing reporting applications.One of the design goals of Visual Studio .NET was to introduce a new set of powerful, integrated tools for developers that provided the majority of the functionality required to create and distribute applications. With that in mind, Visual Studio .NET enhances the ability to create deployment projects using Windows Installer technology that can generate an .msi file for your application, providing a manageable framework for distributing your application.
For more information on Windows Installer, check out the MSDN library and search under .NET Framework Deployment or Windows Installer.
To get us started, we are going to take a look at some of the deployment tools within Visual Studio .NET and then later in the chapter, see how they can be used to deploy our own applications.
