Deploying .NET Applications - II

Sometimes our application may require some pre-requisites before installation. For example, our application may demand that Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher must be installed on the target machine. This calls for a check that must be satisfied for successful installation of the application. We can apply Launch Conditions in such cases. If the condition specified during this step (here, Internet Explorer installed) is not fulfilled then the installation halts. Note that here this step is intended to demonstrate the concept of launch conditions and ‘windowsapp1.exe’ has no actual dependency on Internet Explorer.

To add launch conditions we need to right click on the project in the solution explorer and select View | Launch Conditions. On doing so a Launch Condition Editor will get opened. Next we need to right click on the Requirements on Target Machine node and we would be presented with 5 options to choose from—Add File Launch Condition, Add Registry Launch Condition, Add Windows Installer Launch Condition, Add .NET Framework Launch Condition, and Add Internet Information Services Launch Condition. As the names suggest we can check for the specified entities on the target machine and if these entities are present on the target machine, the installation proceeds otherwise it halts.

Here we have added the Add File Launch Condition. On doing so two nodes called Search For File1 and Condition1 would get added in the Search Target Machine and Launch Conditions nodes respectively falling under the Requirements on Target Machine node. We changed the properties shown in the following table for the Search For File1 entity.

Property	Changed to...	Used
Name	Search For Internet Explorer	Specifies the name used in Launch Condition Editor.
FileName	Iexplore.exe	Specifies the name of a file to search for.
Folder	[ProgramFilesFolder]	Specifies the folder where a file search will start.
Depth	3	Specifies the number of levels of subfolders to search for a file.
MinVersion	5.00	Specifies the minimum version number for a file in the file search.

Now we need to specify the launch condition. To do so we must set the Condition property of the Condition1 entity to FILEEXISTS1. Note that in the Properties window of Search For File1 the Property property is set to FILEEXISTS1. We can also specify a message through the Properties window that would be displayed if the condition evaluates to false (i.e. if file is not found) at installation time.

Changing Icons

We can change icons for our application using the Properties window. To change the icon for the shortcuts we must select the shortcut file and set the Icon property of the file to any .ico file. Note that we need to first copy this file to the Application Folder to make it available.

On the same lines we can change the icon of the setup file that would be displayed in the Add/Remove Programs Window. To do so, we must right click on winsetup in Solution Explorer and select Properties. This would display the Properties window of the whole solution. Here we need to set the AddRemoveProgramsIcon to any desired file.

Adding File Associations

Suppose our application creates files having the user–defined extension (for example, we can serialize data in a file having the .mine extension) and now we wish that on double clicking such a file it should automatically get opened in our application. To achieve this we must use file associations. File Associations allows the developer to associate user-defined file types with his or her application. Assume that we need to deploy a file called myfile.mine with our application. To deploy it along with the application we first need to copy it in the Applications Folder. After installation whenever the user double clicks on this file it should get opened with windowsapp1.exe. Note that here too we have made an assumption for demonstration purpose that our application is creating files having .mine extension. Actually windowsapp1.exe is too simple and does not do any serialization or file I/O.

Now to associate this file with our application we must right click on the project name in the Solution Explorer and select View | File Types. On doing so we are presented with the File Types Editor. Next we need to right click on the node and select Add File type. Now we need to give any file name (here we have used file1) along with the extension (.mine) in the Properties window. This ensures that any file with the .mine extension would get opened with our application. Note that we need not specify the dot ( . ) while mentioning the extension. After this we have to set the Command property of the file to windowsapp1.exe. The File Types Editor along with the Properties window is shown in the following figure.

Now on re-building the project and running the installer, myfile.mine would get deployed along with the application. And moreover whenever the user double clicks on this file it gets opened with our application.

Adding Custom Actions

Custom actions allow us to run code at the end of an installation to perform actions that cannot be handled during installation. For example, if we wish to create a database after installation and before running the deployed application, we need to add the DLL or EXE, which would create a database, as a custom action. We can add custom actions through the Custom Actions Editor. The Custom Actions Editor can be opened by right clicking on the project name and selecting View | Custom Actions. The Custom Actions Editor is shown in the following figure.

This editor contains four folders, each corresponding with a phase of installation—Install, Commit, Rollback, and Uninstall. Custom actions are run in the same order that they are displayed in the editor. They can be reordered by dragging with the mouse or through the Cut and Paste commands on the Edit menu. All the Custom Actions run at the end of installation. In addition to the custom actions we add, there are 5 pre-defined custom actions included in Visual Studio .NET—Event Log, Message Queue, Performance Counter, Service, and Service Process components. We can also add these pre–defined Custom Actions in our project.

Deploying to Special Folders

In addition to the folders mentioned in the previous section—Application Folder, User’s Desktop, and User’s Programs Menu—we can add more folders to the File System Editor through the ‘Add Special Folders’ menu. If we right click on the left pane of the File System Editor we get a popup menu offering fourteen folders from which we can select the ones that we can add.
On selecting a folder from this menu it gets added to the ‘File System on Target Machine’ tree. This provision is made so that we can deploy our files to these specific folders on the target machine. For example, if we have a signed assembly and we wish to deploy it in the Global Assembly Cache of the target machine, all we need to do is add the Global Assembly Cache folder in the File System Editor and copy our signed assembly to it. On installing the application on the target machine one can find the assembly installed in the Global Assembly Cache.

That brings us to the end of discussion on how we can customize our MSI project according to the requirement of the application we want to deploy. If we wish to deploy the application on the development computer while building it, we have to right click on the project name in the Solution Explorer and select Install. And if we wish to deploy it on another computer then, as it might be very obvious to you by now, we need to distribute the winsetup.msi file.