VSTO For Dummies

Chapter 17. Deploying VSTO Solutions

In This Chapter

• Taking a look at ClickOnce

• Deploying your add-in

• Changing your settings

• Solving problems

After you create your Visual Studio for Office project, deployment sounds like the last thing you need to do to complete the whole cycle and make your project available to users.

In this chapter, we discuss how to deploy an add-in with ClickOnce. The example we provide shows the deployment on a local computer, but you can see the real value and magic of ClickOnce if you deploy the project on a network share or a Web site.

Tip

The process for deploying to different sources is much like the process described in this example. So if you like to deploy your add-in or document solution to your Web site, replace all the references in the example from local disk to Web site, and that's it!

Getting the Scoop on ClickOnce

Because deployment is similar for both VSTO add-ins and VSTO documents, we use the term customization for both types. In previous versions of Visual Studio and VSTO, deployment was quite difficult. In order to install your VSTO solution, you had to take care of several prerequisites like .NET 3.5 framework, Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime, and more. In addition, you had to manually set the CAS policy. (For more on CAS, see Chapter 16.)

To install all those prerequisites, you had to create custom install actions and new bootstrapper packages that Visual Studio uses.

Thanks to ClickOnce, you don't have to worry about any of these details ...