Generating Deployment Projects and MSI Installers

Generating a deployment project or an MSI installer for your application simplifies the process of moving your application from your development environment into your production environment. (Enterprise Edition feature. Requires Visual Studio .NET.)

Deployment projects create a single DLL with your application’s ASPX, ASCX, binary object files, images, and other components.  The generated deployment project folder can then be copied to your production server for deployment.

MSI installers are self-contained “executables” that are stand-alone installation programs.  They do not require you to copy any files or deploy any stored procedures; the MSI installer, when run, performs all file installation.  The MSI installer generated by Iron Speed Designer bundles everything into an MSI file that can be installed anywhere.

Caveats

Iron Speed Designer uses the .NET framework compilers or Microsoft Visual Studio .NET to compile applications and to generate deployment folders and MSI installers.  Accordingly, there may be some aspects of your generated application that are not compatible with these compilers that make it impossible for to compile or produce various aspects of your application.

Specifically, using non-English characters in web page names can cause problems.  The following table lists known issues.

See Also

Deploying Applications to a Production Server