What package of .Net framework is required on target client machine in order to run .Net winforms application?

Question

I'm Trying to deploy my winforms project using installshield in order to make is available to be installed on other computers. My project is written under .net framework 3.5.

My question is : What version of .net package should be installed on the target machine in order to be able to run my project?

One thing to notice is that target machine is not connected to internet so I have to embed a standalone offline installer for .net framework.

Surely, with .Net framework 3.5 full redistributable package installed, my project runs fine. But it's ~200MB. Should I really install 200MB in order to run my ~10MB project on target machine?

one other option would be installing client redistributable package which I heard ~30MB. But I couldn't find any official release and am not sure if that's gonna work.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You should deploy with the web installer so that it can determine what your client needs and download only those components. The full install is that big because it contains all variants of the framework for all possible systems (x86, x64, etc.).

This site from Scott Hanselman is an excellent resource on the matter of deploying .NET.

http://www.hanselman.com/smallestdotnet/

As it states on that site:

If you look for .NET Downloads on Microsoft's site, it might look like the .NET Framework is 200+ megs. It's not. Those big downloads are the Complete Offline Versions of every version of the .NET Framework for every kind of machine possible. The big .NET download includes x86, x64, and ia64. It includes .NET 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 code for all systems all in one super-archive.