Creating a deployment project in .net : .NET client application No-Touch deployment is a great way to distribute Windows Forms applications. Using No-Touch a developer can harness the desktop's full processing power while keeping the deployment and maintenance benefits of Web applications.

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by Christopher Goldfarb, senior software architect, Intel Software Solutions Group, Intel Corp.

Harness the full processing power of the desktop while maintaining the deployment and maintenance benefits realized by Web applications.

Proper installation of Windows client applications in a corporate desktop environment has been plagued with numerous issues. These range from simple problems, like attempting to get all of the users to upgrade, to far more complicated, such as DLL versioning problems. Well, fear no more because Microsoft has developed an exciting new feature to simplify deploying and updating client applications using a Web Server. In this article, I'll first be covering the mechanics behind it, security concerns, and recommendations on what types of client apps should be deployed in that fashion.

What is .NET Client Application "No Touch" Deployment?
.NET Client Application "No Touch" Deployment, which I'll refer to hereafter as "no touch," provides an excellent vehicle for distributing Windows Forms applications. Using "no touch," an application developer can harness the full processing power of the desktop while still maintaining the deployment and maintenance benefits realized by Web applications.

With the .NET Framework, Microsoft set out to bring all the deployment and maintenance advantages of the Web application to the desktop application. DLL versioning problems are eradicated, because by default, Windows Forms applications (desktop applications built using the Windows Forms classes of the .NET Framework) are completely isolated from one another, retrieving their DLLs from their own private application directories. DLLs may still be shared among multiple applications, but rather than using the system registry for this, the shared DLLs are stored in the .NET Framework global assembly cache. The global assembly cache can host multiple versions of a given DLL, as well as keeping track of which version goes with which application. As for actually deploying the applications, the .NET Framework allows system administrators to deploy applications and updates to applications just as they would Web applications, via a remote Web server.

Simply stated, with "no touch", Windows Forms applications can be downloaded, installed, and run directly on the users' machines without having to alter any of the registry or shared system components.