How do I prepare a program for deployment?

Question

I'm a complete novice regarding software deployment. I don't have the infrastructure to experiment with servers and networks, and so I don't really know how software is deployed in enterprise.

Let's suppose I've created a very simple Windows .exe program. (You open it, and it shows a "Hello World" message box, together with a 'close' button). The program has no external dependencies and therefore is fully 'portable'.

Now let's suppose my program is wanted by a variety of different companies. They each wish to deploy my program across all of their Windows machines. Each company has some mechanism by which it can deploy software automatically to all of their client machines, but this mechanism may be different in each case. (Speaking as a complete novice, I don't really know what types of 'mechanisms' exist.)

What should I do to prepare my program for easy deployment? Also, could anyone please describe what the most common deployment 'mechanisms' are? Thanks!

Answer 1

I've worked for both ISV's (12 years) and Enterprise IT departments (5 years) so I understand the nature of your question.

At a minimum, you need to create an installer that supports silent (non-interactive) installation, upgrading, and uninstall. You can technically do this using a wide variety of tools but your customers are going to prefer you create an MSI. They prefer this because Windows Installer (.MSI) provides a standardized mechanism with consistent command lines, logging, transactional installation (rollback changes on failure), is rich in metadata ( observable; no black box) and is transformable ( end user can modify the MSI using an onion skin approach to do things like change the name or location or existence of a shortcut, install a service using a specific username/password and so on ).

So as long as you are creating properly authored MSI's you can ignore the deployment method to a certain degree because you are abstracted from it. The trick is to understand the deployment requirements of your application ( easy in your example) and how to implement these requirements in Windows Installer (a somewhat steep learning curve).

I personally use InstallShield and Windows Installer XML (WiX). I also have written a tool called IsWiX (open source on CodePlex) that provides an InstallShield like authoring experience on top of WiX. The scenario you describe can easily be achieved using InstallShield LE (Limited Edition) which is free to Visual Studio customers. More complicated scenarios require more knowledge and advanced tools.