Today I tried to use the publishing feature with visual studio, which creates an application manifest, and not a traditional exe.
What are the benefits of this?
I noticed each time the app starts up it does some kind of check before launching in?
When using Publish on a Windows application, you create a ClickOnce installer. You can find a lot of information about that in the official documentation. Basically, this is an alternative to creating a conventional MSI-based setup project (File/New/Project/Other Project Types/Setup and Deployment/Setup Project).
On MSDN you can find a comparison of the two approaches.
Related
I have a small game that I created, using c# on visual studio. How can I make one file out of it so people can download it and play on their own computers? (assuming they don't use coding programs (like Visual Studio) i.e. regular people)
Step 1: Publish in Visual Studio (right click project file and click publish). This will package your project and its dependencies into a smaller number of files. There is even an option to create a single file, which may be all you need. If you need an installer, the ClickOnce publish option works great for creating installers.
Step 2: Some versions of .NET do not support ClickOnce, and depending on what your needs are you may not want to create a ClickOnce installer. In that case you will have to create an installer yourself. I recommend Inno Setup for creating installers. There are plenty of tutorials on how to use it. Brackeys has a pretty good tutorial on Youtube for Unity projects.
I am writing an application that scaffolds the creation of other Visual Studio solutions. My application is intended to be run on an Azure web app instance and uses C# as the primary middle-tier language.
Previously, I have been able to scaffold or generate VS solutions from a Windows forms app running on my local machine using EnvDte and I know it is possible to do the same via a command line.
Is it possible to accomplish to scaffold/generate a Visual Studio solution from my web app that is itself running on an Azure web instance?
Though out-of-scope for the question, please assume that once generated, the solution will be stored in a folder, zipped and emailed to the user, checked into source control, or some other viable option that is altogether a different issue.
It looks like Visual Studio 2012 will not include Visual Studio Setup and Deployment Projects according to MSDN, so I'm currently learning WiX.
Will this loss of functionality extend to Web Deployment Projects?
Web Deployment Projects will NOT be available in VS2012.
Instead we will focus on bringing first class publishing support for Website projects. You can read more details at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2012/08/06/plans-regarding-website-projects-and-web-deployment-projects.aspx. In a nutshell, you will have all the same features that WDP has, but a lot more as well. Also another good thing about this is that we will have one experience for both Web App Project as well as Website Project. So when we make enhancements both project systems get it.
If you had any customizations in your WDP, you should be able to copy/paste those into the new web publish profiles (they are MSBuild as well). Take a look at the blog above and please do let me know if you have any concerns.
I'm note sure if the links from user1069816 are relevant.
Visual Studio 2012 has an unsure inclusion of Web Deployment projects, but you can do something about it.
Vote for their inclusion: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2639368-add-web-deployment-projects-to-vs11
It looks like Web Deployment Projects will still exist in Visual Studio 2012 according to:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd394698(v=vs.110)
and
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/aspnetue/archive/2012/06/12/visual-studio-2012-rc-deployment-documentation-published.aspx
I have developed an ASP.NET web application in visual studio 2008. I want to run the same application on another system, but Visual Studio is not installed on that system. Is there a way I can run without visual studio?
I heard about deploying, but I don't know much about it.
You can publish your site from Visual Studio to a server that's running IIS, more info here:
How to: Publish Web Application Projects
You can use the built-in deployment features of Visual Studio (right click on the web project, select publish and follow the prompts) or you can simply copy all the dlls plus your content files from the web project to the IIS folder you want to deploy to (known as xcopy deployment). You could also deploy via a setup project, which will create an MSI package, but that's a bit more work. Here's a couple of links that might help, but you can do a search for the options described above and you will find plenty of resources:
Deploying ASP.NET Applications - Part 1
Deploying ASP.NET Applications - Part 2
How do I publish a C++/CLI Windows Forms project for ClickOnce deployment? The properties window for C++/CLI projects does not include a "Publish" tab (like in the C# projects).
You can follow the guidelines for manually deploying a ClickOnce application on MSDN.
This relies on the Windows Software Development Kit and command line tools instead of Visual Studio to do your deployment.
Just another note with this - if you can, I'd recommend trying to migrate to /clr:pure if possible. If you're working with native code, this won't work, but if it's a pure windows forms app, it will make the deployment scenario simpler, since you'll have fewer issues in ClickOnce with CAS requirements.
You cannot ClickOnce deploy an exe written in unmanaged code. The standard approach is to create a managed code stub exe that would launch your actual application.
Here's a related question.