Step by Step Guide to Create a Setup for a Web Application

Deployment of an application is big issue in application software development. Normally you have to check each and every possible scenario before deploying your application so that your current deployment doesn't affect the existing application.

Through Microsoft Visual studio .NET we can do it in a better way.
In this article I would like to discuss about creating a setup project for a web application.
Let us discuss step-by-step process of creating installer for a web application. In this article I am mainly concentrating on Setup project. You can follow same steps for creating installer for any complicated project. 
Step I:
Create a Simple web application using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET



Step II: 
Create a Simple WebForm in the web project. You can also add some more Webform or other control in this project by creating separate directory or in same directory.



Step III:
Select Setup and Deployment Projects and than select Web Setup Project also specify the Location and name of your project. 

After creating setup project right click on project and than select view, it will show different possible operations, which you can perform with this setup project. 

These options are

• File System
• Registry
• File Types
• User interfaces
• Custom Actions
• Launch conditions 

Step IV:
Select File system, it is use to create file system on the target machine. Through this you can specify what details you want to provide at the target machine.
For providing right click on web application project than select add it will display certain option out of that select project output. After that select all details you want to supply for target machine. 

 
Step V:

Second Selection is Registry Selection in this selection you can specify the dll, which you want to install at client registry. For that you have to create exact structure of registry in the registry folder structure and then you can specify the required dll for installation in that structure.
You can create new folder by right clicking on that folder and than select new key and define key Name. Each key is associated with a property window where you can specify which dll you want to install in the registry. 

Step VI:          
Select User Interface from the view in this selection you can specify what are the screens you want to display during installation process. You can change it, remove it or you can define new screen by right clicking on the screen header. 

Step VIII: 
Select Launch Conditions through this condition you can specify your criteria, which are prerequisite for your application installation. 

Step IX:
Now final step is compile the setup project. After compilation you will notice that it has generated SampleProjectSetup.msi at applications bin/debug folder. 
You can supply this msi the target machine, when you run this msi at target machine it will create a virtual directory as well as create same folder structure, which you have specified in File System. This installer will also install the specified those libraries in the registry which are specified in the Registry. 
Now you can browse that application at the target machine in same way as you have done at your own machine.