Create a Setup Program

It’s hard to imagine a deployment technique that’s easier than the ClickOnce Publish wizard. Creating a Setup Project is a little more complicated, but not much, and only because it’s far more flexible and there’s a Setup Wizard that will do most of the basic configuration for you.

Remember, setup projects aren’t available in the Express edition of Visual Studio. But if you’re running Visual Studio Basic or above, let’s try it out:

1 Add a new project to the solution, either from the context menu in Solution Explorer, or from File menu. In the New Project dialog, select Setup Wizard from the Other Project Types, Setup and Deployment category. You can call the project anything you like; I’ve called it SetupProject.