How to deploy a project in Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Express?

Question

I tried to look at several tutorials online and nothing helped..

I have a chess game that I want to deploy. I want it to seem as a portable chess game.. you click the exe and the chess game runs..

How can you achieve that?

Answer 1

If you have a paid for version of Visual Studio you can use a Visual Studio Installer project to create an MSI. This is not the most flexible method though and I believe it will not be supported in future releases.

I'd recommend learning WIX . It has a steep learning curve but it is very powerful and fully maintained. If you install Votive which comes with it then it makes life a bit easier by adding auto-complete etc. when you edit the files in Visual Studio.

Answer 2

If you right click on the project in the solution viewer, I get a "publish", select a directory, if you select install from CDrom (eg a file based install), it creates a setup.exe.

Have you tried this?

Long as they have .net installed, I believe this should be sufficient. Its not very elegant and you dont get to configure the setup app.

Answer 3

You just need to deploy the copy of the binaries to where ever you need the application.

When you run your application an exe file is created which you can then use outside of visual studio. Look in the properties of your project under the build tab there is an output path, that is where your exe is.