What's New in Deployment

  • Article

Deployment in Visual Studio .NET has changed from the traditional deployment model in Visual Studio 6.0. For a discussion of the options available for deployment, see Deployment Projects.

Deployment projects within a solution are used to create Windows Installers or merge modules. In general, you will want to create a separate deployment project for each logical computer in a multitier solution.

Note   Windows Installer project files (.wip) created with the Visual Studio Installer add-in for Visual Studio 6.0 cannot be opened in Visual Studio .NET.

What's New in Visual Studio .NET 2002

  • Visual Studio .NET 2003 includes the following features, which were introduced in Visual Studio .NET 2002.
    Create Windows Installers
    You can distribute finished applications to customers using Microsoft Windows Installer technology. For more information, see Introduction to Microsoft Windows Installer.

  • Deploy Web Applications
    You can deploy Web applications to Web servers, automatically including all dependencies. For more information, see Deployment of a Web Setup Project.

  • Deploy Shared Components
    You can create packages for sharing components that are used by multiple applications, eliminating versioning problems. For more information, see Merge Module Projects.

  • Dynamic Properties
    You can now store property values from your application in a resource file rather than in the application's compiled code. This allows you to make changes to property values without recompiling your application, or to set property values during installation. For more information, see Walkthrough: Passing Data to a Custom Action.

    Note   The Standard Edition of Visual Basic .NET only supports the creation of Windows Installers. For more information, see Visual Basic Standard Edition Features.

See Also

What's New in Visual Studio .NET | What's New in Visual Basic and Visual C# | Deploying Applications and Components | Deployment Walkthroughs