I have created a simple inventory application in WPF. How should I give it to client now ?
One way what I did: I have set my AppPresentation solution as start up project and I can see all the DLLs from other solutions are added in the Debug and Release directory of this solution.
When I copy the Release folder to other drive (from D: to C:) and run the AppPresentation.exe some Error occurs about some DLL missing but I can still see those DLLs in this folder.
However when I copy the debug folder to the other drive and run the application i.e. AppPresentation.exe now I can run the application successfully with complete working.
Can I give this entire Debug folder to the client and expect that it runs perfectly on his machine ? I will ensure .NET 4.0 Framework is installed on that machine (but not Visual Studio ofcourse). Will this work ?
It will work as long as you have the required version of the .NET Framework installed on the client and all the necessary dll's have been included,
Ideally you should look at creating a Visual Studio setup project:
Using a setup project has the following advantages:
All your dll's and other files required for the application to run will be consolidated in one setup file
You can specify prerequsites such as .NET Framework which will prevent installation until all the required components have been installed first.
Users can specify exactly where on disk the application should be installed without manually copying the dlls (as would be the case in your scenario).
This is but a few advantages of using a setup project but hopefully you'll be convinced to give it a try as it is the preferred way of installing Windows applications
P.S If your setup project gets more complex consider looking at Wix
Related
I hope this is no duplicate but I couldn't find any related topic. Every developer knows the problem. I create my app, deploy it and on some other machine it does not run because some dependency is missing. Often those dependecies are part of the workloads installed along with Visual Studio or some SDKs.
My question now is if there is a way to test my app on my dev machine like it had not installed SDKs and VS? Basically I want the app to only consider dependencies I explicitely specified through project references, nuget packages or locally copied files. Or in short: every dependency should be part of the app's deployment target folder.
Of course some really basic OS-dependent stuff needs to be used as well but I don't want the app to use stuff like OpenAL, GLFW, Windows SDK or similiar things just because I have installed it on my machine beforehand.
I hope you can understand what I mean. So I basically need some sandbox. I know there are things like VMs, docker, etc but I would like to use this as I run my app from Visual Studio. So if I hit F5 I want the app to ignore globally installed stuff at all.
I work with VS 2022. Thanks for advice.
You could use a continuous integration system in order to build (from scratch), publish and test on a fixed known build agent configuration. I used Teamcity.
You could use a Virtual Machine or a docker image as agent PC.
Moreover you can configure more agents with different possible configurations.
As a general rule of thumb, you can reference Nuget packages instead of assemblies in the GAC. This way, they will be copied to your application's bin folder.
You can also use .NET Application Publishing to create a deployable folder with your application. If you're targeting .NET Core, and the target machine may not have .NET Core installed or you don't know what version it will have, you can create a self contained release which will include the .NET Core binaries in the release.
See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/
I have deployed a Windows Forms Application (Visual Studio 2013 C#) to a file share and will get my users to run the app from this file share. The app uses Entity Framework 6 and works fine from the file share but there is a delaying in loading the EntityFramework.dll during execution for the first time.
Is it possible to move just this dll from the file share to the local pc and tell the app to use it from the local pc?
As #tede24 stated, before trying to solve this problem, make sure EntityFramework.dll is actually your problem.
Once you make sure it is, here are the options I can think of:
1) Use ClickOnce
ClickOnce is not popular, but it still seems to be the preferred way for deploying intranet applications. Yes, it supports version checking and auto updates.
2) Use some sort of XCopy installation
You can create a batch/PowerShell to copy the application content locally from your intranet. If you want to go futher, you can even verify whether the version is the latest before launching.
3) Try putting EntityFramework in the GAC on the client machine (not recommended)
EntityFramework is not meant to be GACed, but you can still try to do that. I would strongly avoid it because of dependencies and update problems you might run into.
I have developed a C# winform app in VS 2012, but when I deploy it to another machine, it's exe file does not launch until and unless the machine has VS 2012 installed in it. Initially I thought there was a problem with deployment, but I have tried all methods, by simply transferring the bin folder to creating a setup project using installShield, I tried deploying a simple app which was successful without having to install VS 2012. Could someone please give me the reason behind this dependency of my app with VS 2012, and how to get rid of it? I cannot afford to install a VS 2012 on every machine that the software needs to deployed to. Thank you so much.
This is all about which .Net Framework is installed on the machine.
For Instance, VS2012 will run on .Net Framework 4.5, but the computer your trying to run this software on maybe running on an earlier version.
If any of the assemblies that your adding to your solution are built on a later version of the .Net framework then it will be incompatible on the users machine.
change Your project Debug mode to Release Mode Then Run The App then Go to >Bin > Release Folder then u can Find Exc Setup !! Have Fun with Code !!
Probably your app depends on some assembly that is installed along with VS. You can use Dependency Walker to find out exactly what. On second thought, since this is a .Net application your dependencies should be limited to .Net assemblies and the .Net framework - you could find out exactly what you're missing on the target machine with dotPeek.
Have I an application using sqlite...
Ive tried this:
installing via ClickOnce Application setup (it works)
I Put SQLite.dll file together with .exe in the same folder. (it works}
hmm the folder with an .exe only (not working)
What I mean is when you build the project and get the .exe on the folder \bin\Debug and move it somewhere then when you run the app errors will not occurs.
I wondering if there's a way that i can run even without installing ClickOnce Application setup?
I thinking of setup the SQLite.dll on specific path reference? Is it possible to do that?
-thanks
System.Data.SQLite.dll is not part of the standard .NET Framework so it does not get installed in the GAC of the client machines when .NET runtime is installed at first.
that's the reason why you should have this dll referenced by your executable, distributed together and in the same folder as your exe is deployed.
or you could distribute it somewhere else like in a sub-folder of your application setup and have proper entries in the configuration file or in the .NET C# code to specify where assemblies not found in the standard locations have to be loaded from.
You can use Nuget to get the package installed. For my case, it automatically created 2 subfolders for me, which is x86 and x64, I just followed the folder structure in the bin folder, and it worked fine for my case.
I have created a windows application and I have published it by publishing wizard.
Now I want to make it portable so that the end user does not need to install the application.
The application is very simple and the only dll it is referencing is office outlook interop.
Please let me know how can I make the application portable
You should be able to just copy the files in the bin folder and launch the app from there. This is called "XCOPY deployment", long marketed as one of the major benefits of .NET applications.
Just make sure that you set the properties on the Office reference so that the DLL is copied into the bin folder, too.
However, for this to work, the client machine must have the appropriate version of the .NET Framework installed. So it won't be truly portable unless you can control the configuration of all target machines, but at least it's a good start.
There's no need for the Winforms application to be installed. Just set Copy Local to true for your external referenced dlls. Build your project and copy all the files in /Bin/Release or /Bin/Debug (depending on project settings).
The only thing that has to be installed on the client's machine is the appropriate .Net Framework version.