[blogwhodle3]

Now many people make installers or just compress the bin folder to distribute their apps. A very easy way to distribute your apps is by publishing them. This can be entirely done without leaving VS.

The very first step is to click on the publish button!
This can be done by doing this: (Build>>Publish)


Pick a location, and choose "CD-ROM" (Although your are telling VS that you will publish this to a CD, it will still publish to the location you previously decided, so the CD is not neccessary). Choose whether or not you would like it to check for updates, and that's pretty much it!




As you can clearly see, the resulting installer will auto-create a start menu shortcut, a control panel shortcut, and will install it in the programs folder automatically!
You should get "Application Files", "[Name].application", and "setup.exe". Put that in a zip file in your application is ready to be distributed, and can be burned onto a CD if you actually want to!

Running setup.exe, the installer itself is an extremely easy to use single dialog box.


Upsides:
Super easy to create!
Super easy to use!
It does most of the stuff you would want to do!
0% Effort Necessary!
It actually works!!!

Downsides:
No License agreement or customization or anything

What it's useful for:
For distributing freeware and non-copyright and 0% having to do with legal stuff- applications.
For asking other people for help, a full installer itself is a challenge for many or for some just too much work, and just compressing the bin folder usually doesn't work. This is an easy way to distribute your program.

[tlhIn`toq]

Good tutorial for a quick-n-easy deployment. Especially appreciated from someone who just joined the site! Welcome.

For the sake of providing alternatives there is a fairly comprehensive tutorial on building a more complete installer with customizations. I'm not saying one is better than the other. Just different approaches for different needs.
http://www.dreaminco...-setup-project/

[DarenR]

nice quick work on this one. Keep up the good work.

[blogwhodle3]

Although this post may/may not belong here...
If I wanted to post a tutorial about XNA, where would I put it, because although XNA is just a framework for C#, I don't know where to submit my tutorial.

This definitely doesn't belong here, but I don't know where to put this either (I'm new here)
but DIC is where I found a bunch of my programming answers long before I signed up, however, Chrome says that it found malware on DIC from cellhome.ca and bunnybrothers or something and it won't let me look at most of the pages on DIC. I logged into my account and it started happening less frequently but It won't let me go to other forums on DIC so I pretty much have to put this stuff here. What should I do?

[modi123_1]

Quote

If I wanted to post a tutorial about XNA, where would I put it, because although XNA is just a framework for C#, I don't know where to submit my tutorial.

Game programming.

Quote

This definitely doesn't belong here, but I don't know where to put this either (I'm new here)
but DIC is where I found a bunch of my programming answers long before I signed up, however, Chrome says that it found malware on DIC from cellhome.ca and bunnybrothers or something and it won't let me look at most of the pages on DIC. I logged into my account and it started happening less frequently but It won't let me go to other forums on DIC so I pretty much have to put this stuff here. What should I do?

There is a 'site support and questions' where this would be appropriate. You'll also notice there are a few people positing similar issues so a new thread may not be required but a reply to an existing thread would be.

[Skydiver]

Beware that ClickOnce applications (which is what you are doing above) run under even tighter security contexts than a normal user does. If you need to access files and other resources outside the current directory of the application, you'll need to jump through some hoops.