Easy To Configure and Deploy

Project Designer

The Project Designer, accessible from the Project… Properties… menu, is the centralized place to configure your application. The Project Designer lets you configure an application splash screen, startup form, application icon, resources, settings, and more.

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Settings Designer

The Settings Designer makes it easy to store and retrieve custom user-level settings, including a user's preferred home page for Microsoft Internet Explorer or application-level settings such as the connection string to a database. User settings are automatically stored in a user-specific location (e.g., C:\Documents and Settings\%user%\Application Data\Microsoft\AppName.exe) without requiring you to read and write files from the local hard drive. Because user settings are stored in a location that is unique to a user's Windows account, multiple users easily store their own preferences separate from others. Best of all, this is all implemented without you needing to write code.

You can bind application settings to Windows Forms controls by using the Application Settings property in the Property Window to display the Application Settings dialog box.

You can also programmatically access all of the settings in your application using the My.Settings namespace.

Resources Designer

The Resource Designer is a graphical interface that makes it easy to embed resource files like images, sounds, and icons directly into your application executable. Embedding resources is useful so that your application doesn't "break" if a user accidentally deletes a file that the application needs to run.

You can use embedded resources in your Windows Forms controls by using the Property Window pane and the Select Resource dialog box.

Similar to application settings, you can also programmatically access resources using the My.Resources namespace.

Easily deploy your application

Visual Basic Express includes ClickOnce deployment technology, making it as easy to share a Windows application as it is to share a Web application. Using ClickOnce, your application can be automatically deployed and updated to a Web site, file share, FTP site, or even burned onto a CD. To publish your application using ClickOnce, select the Publish Wizard button on the Publish tab of the Project Designer.

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The Publish Wizard lets you configure whether you want your application to be available for offline or for online use only.

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The following diagram shows the finished result of the Publish Wizard after deploying to a Web site.

Simply click Install to install your application which will automatically detect and install application dependencies, such as the .NET Framework 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition.

Easily update your application

If you need to make a change to your application, you can simply re-run the ClickOnce Publish Wizard to re-deploy to the server. When the outdated version of the application is run, ClickOnce will notice that a new version is available on the Web and prompt the user to dynamically download and update to the latest version.

Configuring ClickOnce

You can also configure how your application uses ClickOnce in the Publish tab, including settings for the publish location, product name, support URL, and how often to check for updates.