Whether building a console application, a web service, or a smart client, you eventually need to distribute your finished work. Deploying .NET Applications is a complete guide to delivering applications built with .NET. Packed with hands-on guidance, practical examples, and war stories from the authors' many experiences with deployment scenarios, this book provides everything you need to know.
The book begins by introducing the deployment problem, then examines why deployment is an engineering problem for organizations. Subsequent chapters provide detail about deploying each type of application, then discuss automated deployments. You'll want to get ahold of this book because it
- Includes hands-on detail about the newest deployment tools, MSBuild and ClickOnce
- Discusses many best practices of .NET 2.0 software deployment
- Covers details about automating new software deployments
Previously the build process that Visual Studio followed was basically a black box and was difficult
to customize. With the arrival of Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0 comes the arrival of the
Microsoft Build Engine, otherwise known as MSBuild. MSBuild is the utility that Visual Studio
uses to build your managed (C#, VB .NET, and J#) projects. MSBuild is an XML-based build engine
and a tool that has been developed with customizability and extensibility in mind from its
conception. By using MSBuild, you can change how your projects are built, creating customizations
to fit your needs.
With the advent of MSBuild, you no longer have to rely on third-party tools to handle the
custom aspects of building your application. In addition, not only is this approach supported
by Microsoft, but it is completely integrated with Visual Studio. If you need to tweak the settings
for the C# compiler or how resources are generated, you now have this ability. The entire build
process is open, and you can customize it in any way necessary. With other third-party tools
this is simply unachievable.
In this book, we will start with MSBuild concepts that you need to know in order to get
started, and then we will cover some advanced topics. Over the course of a few chapters we
will take you from an MSBuild newbie to an MSBuild expert! For example, we will discuss how
to inject custom steps into the build process, how to create custom tasks, and much more. We
will cover all of the necessary topics that you need to know in order to use MSBuild in all the
great ways that it was intended.
