Chapter 6. Publishing Applications
In This Chapter
A developer spends substantial time developing and debugging an application within the confines of his development environment. Then, when the application seems to perform as desired and has the requisite features, it is turned over to manufacturing to be distributed to customers. At that point, the developer gets a call from an irate customer who indicates that the application either fails or seems to have caused the failure of other seemingly unrelated applications. If it can be assumed that the developer has sufficiently debugged the application, the problem can be more than likely blamed on what is known as DLL Hell. Either the customer installed another application that changed one or more of the system DLLs, or manufacturing built an installation script that overwrote some system DLLs for your application to function properly, but that causes other applications on the customer's machine to fail. DLL Hell is almost impossible to resolve satisfying all parties. One of the design criteria for the .NET Framework was to solve this problem. This chapter shows what can be done to make sure that your application works as well in the field as it does on your desktop. In addition, it covers some of the deployment-related security issues with which you should be concerned.