Ways to deploying console applications in C#

Question

Hello. I have a relatively complex console application which relies on several dlls. I would like to "ship" this in the best form. My preferred way would be an exe file with all dependencies embedded in it (not that big, about 800K). Another thing would be to just zip the contents of the "Debug" folder and make that available, but I'm not sure if everything will be available like that (will all dependencies be resolved just by zipping the debug folder?)

So my question is: What reliable practices exist for deploying console apps written in C# using VisualStudio 2008?

(Again, apologies for the naive question.)

Thanks.

ANSWER: Thank you very much to all. I have decided to temporarily(!?) accept Jon's answer... simply by an Occam's razor argument. We will see how it scales up. If it doesn't, I will change the answer. I have also voted up Brien's answer, because it's a good one, just too "involved" for my purposes (there's also a usability problem: it makes users think they will get a windows program, when they only get a console). Thanks again.

Answer 1

If you just copy the Foo.exe, dlls and Foo.exe.config files, it's likely to be okay. Have a look at what else is in the debug folder though - you (probably) don't want to ship the .pdb files, or Foo.vshost.exe. Is there anything else? If you've got any items marked as Content which are copied to the output folder, you'll need those too.

You could use ilmerge to put all the dependencies into one exe file, but I'm somewhat leery of that approach - I'd stick with exe + dependency dlls.

Answer 2

You should look into setup projects in Visual Studio. They let you set up dependencies and include the DLLs you need. The end result is a setup.exe and an MSI installer.

Here's a walkthrough that should help.

Answer 3

Jon's answers is good - I would also recommend ILMerge as a tool to simplify your deployment by allowing you to merge your executable with all its dependencies. This would allow you to have Foo.exe which would contain all your dll's as well.

Answer 4

Create a setup project in VS08 and add the primary output of the console app project to it, this resolves the dependencies and packages them in a .msi

Answer 5

OR you could use a self-extracting ZIP file. Package all the normal files up - .exe, .dll, .config, and anything else - into a zip file. Extract into a temp directory and set the run-on-extract program to be the actual console exe.

Answer 6

Another option could be to use Windows Installer Xml (http://wix.sourceforge.net/). We use it at work and it has loads more features for complex installations when compared to the standard Visual Studio deployment projects.