Deploying a wpf application by giving the release folder of Visual Studio Solution

Question

I am going to deploy/publish a wpf application to users by simply giving(via inno setup compiler) the Release folder of Visual Studio 2012 solution. But I think I do not want all the files coming from there because some may for the purpose for Visual Studio. SO what are the files that I can remove to reduce that size of my deployment ?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

You'll probably have the following files in your Release directory after build:

MyApp.exe
MyApp.pdb
MyApp.exe.config
MyApp.vshost.exe
MyApp.vshost.exe.config
MyApp.vshost.exe.manifest

Files you have to include in deployment:

MyApp.exe
MyApp.exe.config

.exe.config contains default application settings and has to be deployed unless you use settings designer in which case default values will be embedded in the assembly itself.

Files you can optionally include in deployment:

MyApp.pdb

.pdb file contains debugging info (assembly's debug symbols) providing you info about code line numbers when analysing call stacks in exception/crash reports.

Files used by Visual Studio so they should not be deployed:

MyApp.vshost.exe
MyApp.vshost.exe.config
MyApp.vshost.exe.manifest

Release directory can also contain DLLs (build outputs from other projects or 3rd party libraries) referenced by the main executable and they shall also be included in the deployment.