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wixvisual-studio-2005patchsetup-deployment

How to deliver only changes through .Net setup or patch technique


we have our business apps and size is 64 MB. every time add new functionality or change existing one then we rebuild our setup and deliver to client. so this means every time we are delivering 64 MB or more than that to our client.

we have our main win form project and also there many other class library project in our project solution. i am looking for easy way out to deliver only changes to our client.

may be changes could be there in our win form project or could be there in any class library. so wherever changes made i just only deliver changes through setup and i want just client would install that setup or run any exe file and could see the changes we made in code. i create setup with VS2005 setup creation option. how suggest me the best option for creating patch like apps which any client just install and get the changes in his apps. give me the best idea to implement in detail. thanks


Solution

  • When using Wix to generate an installer for your project, you can use it to also generate a patch file which will update only changed files.

    Visual Studio 2005 setup projects don't really support Patch building and such. It's meant as a rudimentary solution for building installers. Wix, however, is what Microsoft uses internally to build the setup experience for Visual Studio 2012 and other products. There is a very extensive walk-through available here.

    Wix does come with a steep learning curve. Would you have been using Visual Studio 2010 or 2012, then you could take advantage of a couple of templates that make it much easier to build a setup for a given type of application. I don't believe these will work with Visual Studio 2005.

    This book might also guide you.