WPF Application Deployment

WPF Application Deployment

For the purposes of demonstration, let’s build something vital for procrastinators the

world over: an application to generate excuses. The application was started with the

“Windows Application (WPF)” project template in Visual Studio 2005 and was

implemented with some very simple code. When you run it, it gives you an excuse

from its vast database.

Simple Publishing

For anyone to use this wonderful application, it must be published. The simplest

way to publish your WPF application is by right-clicking on the project in the Solution

Explorer and choosing the Publish option, which will bring up the first page of

the Publish Wizard. It asks you to choose where you’d like to deploy your application, including

to the disk, to a network share, to an FTP server, or to a web site. By default, the

Publish Wizard will assume you want to publish to the Publish subdirectory of your

project directory. Clicking the Next button.Because we’ve chosen to publish to something besides a web site, the Publish Wizard

wants to know how users will access your published application—in other

words, from a URL, from a UNC path, or from some optical media. (If you choose to

publish to a web site, the only way to access the application is from a URL, so it

won’t bother to ask.) We’d like to test web deployment, so we pick that option and

leave the default URL alone. Clicking Next.

For WPF applications, lets us choose whether we’d like this application to

be made available online (when the computer is able to connect to the application’s

URL) as well as offline (when the computer can’t connect to the URL), or whether

you’d like the application to be only available online. These two options correspond

to the ClickOnce terms locally installed and online only, respectively.

It reminds us what we get with a locally installed ClickOnce application (i.e.,

the application will appear in the Start menu and in the Add or Remove Programs

Control Panel). Clicking Finish causes Visual Studio to publish the application to the

filesystem, including a publish.htm file that you can use to test deployment. If you

happen to have an IIS application set up in the same folder to which Visual Studio

publishes, it will launch the publish.htm file for you, 

For simple needs, this is the complete experience for publishing a WPF ClickOnce

locally installed application.