Deployment .net 4.0 application

Question

I intend to develop an application using .Net 4.0, and intend to use EF4 but I am little concerned with deployment of the application.

My target audience will be small businesses and application domain will be related to routine accounting. There are several similar solutions already available in market and good thing about them is they are really easy to install, distribute and backup restore.

With .Net 4.0, it would be difficult to distribute, as for .Net 3.5 a complete framework distributable is around 200mb and take around 20 mins to install which is really tough and will be a nightmare if I get support call because of system OS reinstall etc.

What is your opinion on developing application with .Net 4.0? There are other language like DELPHI which might be enough for my targeted application, and really easy to deploy. Kindly share your thoughts on this. (I am not a delphi developer, I am .Net developer but need to learn EF4 for my application).

Another question related to this is EF4 is only well supported with MSSQL and doesn't have support of MS Access. Which again cause some problem for me in deployment and maintain.

Answer 1

If you use .NET 4.0 you can deploy the framework to the client with only the Client Profile, that is a lot smaller than the full framework.

More info can be found on: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc656912.aspx

Answer 2

Regarding question related to MS Access and MS SQL, I found that one can use SQL Server 3.5 Compact Edition which is now supporting desktop application as well. It run in application's process but well enough for application targeting clients needs simple usage and deployments.

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2005/en/us/compact.aspx