How to make a stand alone file in Visual Studio C# Express?

Question

There was already a bunch of questions like that but how do I make a stand alone .exe file in Visual Studio C# Express? There is no setup and deployment tab/bar in here.

I've pressed that "Publish projectName" but not sure if that is right. There is a bunch of other .exe files in bin\\Debug and bin\\Release. Which one do I need and is this actually correct? My project is WinForms C# app, nothing too fancy. Need to make sure it works on other computers.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Take that with the same name as your project. So if your project is names MyWinFormApp, you need MyWinFormApp.exe.

If there is nothing like MyWinFormApp.exe in bin/Release than you probably did not built your application in the release mode. However, if you succeeded to build your application in a debug mode, there should be a MyWinFormApp.exe file in bin/Debug folder.

You can find MyWinFormApp.vshost.exe there as well, but that is not what you want. It is just some helper executable for a compiler.

Also, make sure that if your application uses any other libraries which are not part of the .NET framework you have to ship them along with the exe file as well in order to make it working on another computers.