How do I make an installer for my Visual Studio 2010 C# project?

Question

I've been working on an application for a while - I was finally ready to demo it to my supervisor but when I installed it on his machine, things fell apart. At its core, it's reacting on string output from C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe. It's an auxillary application for other developers at our company - our machines have the same configuration, for the most part. Judging by how the software reacted, it was not able to read output correctly from that program.

I'm not sure if it was a permissions issue between the application and appcmd.exe but I think it might be the installer. We tried to load my solution onto his machine and it wouldn't let us build because he didn't have some key that my machine apparently had. I'm wondering if there's a similar story with the installer.

Should I just try using the publish function instead of building an exe and packaging that exe with the installer? Right now I have an Installer project inside of this project that's taking the output from the main project. I'm not sure if that's "right" or if there is a right way. I just recently installed Wix, but I'm not sure that'll help me either. How do I correctly ready this application for deployment?

Answer 1

You should try using ClickOnce for a desktop application. It is located in the "Publish" tab of your project's Properties, as you said.

Answer 2

The problem ended up being a permissions issue - nothing about the installer. We just needed app.manifest to contain <requestedExecutionLevel level="requireAdministrator" uiAccess="false" /> and ClickOnce wouldn't allow that, so we went with a.msi installer and things are moving swimmingly.