Generating Deployment Projects and MSI Installers

Command: Deploy, Generate Deployment Installer (MSI)…

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.

Option	Description
Deployment Folder	The file folder location where the deployment project will be created.
Generate MSI installer	If selected, an MSI installer will be generated for your application.
Assembly Information	Provide this information to better identify your application.

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.

Compiler	Output Option	Code Language	Non-English Characters Allowed in Web Page Names
Compiler	Output Option	Code Language	Non-English Culture	English Culture
.NET 2.0 Pre-compiler	Compiled application	C#	Yes	Yes
.NET 2.0 Pre-compiler	Compiled application	Visual Basic	Yes	Yes
Visual Studio 2005	MSI installer	C#	No	No
Visual Studio 2005	MSI installer	Visual Basic	Yes	No
Visual Studio 2005	Deployment folder	C#	No	No
Visual Studio 2005	Deployment folder	Visual Basic	Yes	No

MSI deployment installer project is missing the MSI file or Setup.exe

In some cases, the 'Generate Deployment Installer' process completes but the setup project generated does not contain an <App Name>.msi or Setup.exe file. Furthermore, when the deployment solution is opened with Visual Studio 2005 the output folder shows:

(unable to determine name)

The procedure to fix this is explained in MSDN Library article, "Deployment in Visual Studio, Cannot find outputs of project output group":

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xsyw70ef(vs.80).aspx