Deploying your .Net Solutions
Posted on February 7th, 2009 in Software | No Comments »
Let us assume you are a dude/dudette trying to keep up with technology and you are developing solutions using visual studio 2008. That is quite what the average nice geek would do… no ?
Let us also assume that by of course your cleverness, patience and long nights surfing the web you managed to code your totally bug free solution…. Deployment Time soon *YeY*
Well not exactly *YeY* it is more like an aouch in my opinion.
Let me elaborate.
First you have to get your head around the many application deployment options which Microsoft currently offers then In order to distribute your application you need to have the .Net Framework installed at the client machine. Those are the size of the “Installers” YOU will need to download and package with your application.
• .NET Framework 1.0: 19.7MB
• .NET Framework 1.1: 23.1MB
• .NET Framework 2.0: 22.4MB
• .NET Framework 3.0: 50.3MB ( x86 )
• .NET Framework 3.0: 90.1MB ( x64 )
• .NET Framework 3.5: 197.0MB
• .Net Framework 3.5 SP1: 231.5 MB
If you happen to live in an internet- challenged country like mine, you will know the cost and time consumption and stress levels required to download the framework only.
You can manage to download it yourself, you are a developer after all, and you can give the client the corresponding CD, but if you are building a vertical application that you’re distributing over the Internet you are probably more concerned about the size of your installation, and people are weary of downloading a 200 meg runtime in order to run an application that has a 2 meg footprint on its own
a good thought is that you would want to install the client version of the framework
The full package is a 231MB download. .NET , The .NET 3.5 SP1 `Client Profile` is now a 255.5MB download. Don’t ask !
We are not done yet, While installing at the client computer, you will need up to 500 MB Disk space for the framework alone without adding your own application files, try to explain that in your MSR Document!
Anger management 101 – Developers Edition says that you should google first and indeed I ran into this link called smallestdotnet, it is a single detects what framework you have, give you a link to download an installer that will download the actual installer that you will be needing for this specific computer (bootstraper), I tested on a vmware, I had 3.5, the upgrade size was 52 MB… it doesn’t work for mass distributing software tho but it was better for my pc.
However, hope in the horizon, Microsoft will release a super-small download for XP SP2 machines that have no version of the .NET Framework. It’s a 280k setup program that will download the “Client Profile” of the .NET Framework that’s only about 26megs and will run most Client .NET applications. Then, in the next few months, those “Client Profile” will receive the rest of the complete .NET Framework (another 30 or so megs) over Windows Update

