publishing as an exe

[Rappa]

i made a c# app and it ive never published one before so i didnt know what to do. i ran the wizard and it gave me a bunch of files and a setup. i sent the setup to a friend and it just errored. i was wondering what i need to do to get an actuall installer when a setup is clicked on, like a real program, where it asked to make a desktop icon and agree to terms.

or how do u publish so it just gives you an exe so you download the exe and it runs, with no installation whatsoever.

thanks.

[Brandoe85]

Do a google for deployment projects, like:
http://www.codeguru.com/Csharp/.NET/net_general/visualstudionetadd-ins/article.php/c7219/

Good luck;

[paulq]

What is your friends OS?
What is his exact error message? (In case you didn't already know, you can use CTRL+C to copy message box information to the clipboard, tell him to do that, paste it in an e-mail to you.)
What kind of project did you create? Does it have many external dependencies?

how do u publish so it just gives you an exe so you download the exe and it runs, with no installation whatsoever

Quite simple. Instead of a DEBUG version, create a RELEASE one. Build EXE, then look in your project folder for the executable. Keep in mind you need to keep any other required files in the same directory with it.

Remember that MSVC# is an interpreted language, meaning that the main program is not comprised of machine instructions but of instructions to the .NET common library runtime. Therefore you need the CLR in order to run any .NET PE. I believe all fully updated versions of Windows XP SP2+ should have the .NET CLR installed, but I could be wrong.

[Fatmumuhomer]

I think looking into the deployment projects might help you (as mentioned above).

If you're building an application that has dependencies (such as other DLLs and such), you can deploy it as an msi which will install the exe and required file to a certain directory.