no-touch deployment book

[wobbles]

Hi Everyone,

I'm really struggling to get no-touch deployment to work well (if at all, in some
cases).

Can anyone recommend a good book on this topic?
There seem to be a lot of blogs about "no-touch deployment"/"smart clients" but
nothing that explains the entire technology, how to implement it effectively or the
various aspects involved - in any step-by-step, cohesive manner.

Also, is no-touch deployment worth pursuing?
I've read arguments for and against.
The lack of books on the topic lead me to believe that it's still in a prototypical,
"test out the waters" stage.
Should I wait for Whidbey, Longhorn, etc? How will these "improve" no-touch
deployment, if at all?

The ease of deployment it offers sounds very exciting - but I can't yet get it to
work very well.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Wobbles

 

[Joe Mayo [C# MVP]]

Hi Everyone,

I'm really struggling to get no-touch deployment to work well (if at all, in some
cases).

Can anyone recommend a good book on this topic?
There seem to be a lot of blogs about "no-touch deployment"/"smart clients" but
nothing that explains the entire technology, how to implement it effectively or the
various aspects involved - in any step-by-step, cohesive manner.

Also, is no-touch deployment worth pursuing?
I've read arguments for and against.
The lack of books on the topic lead me to believe that it's still in a prototypical,
"test out the waters" stage.
Should I wait for Whidbey, Longhorn, etc? How will these "improve" no-touch
deployment, if at all?

The ease of deployment it offers sounds very exciting - but I can't yet get it to
work very well.

Hi Wobbles,

Since you've been looking around, I suppose you've already read most of the
available articles on the Web. Just in case, here's a link to several
articles on the subject:

http://www.windowsforms.net/Default.aspx?tabindex=3&tabid=40#Deployment

When I started doing this stuff there weren't any books and I had to figure
it out on my own. Additionally, Chris Sells wrote a series of articles that
helped me immensely. I haven't bought his Windows Forms in C# book yet, but
you may want to stop by the bookstore and take a peek to see if any of the
goodness of his articles made it into the book.

Some of the toughest issues to work through, as you may know by now, have to
do with security. I've found the .NET Security/Addison Wesley book to be a
very good resource. It certainly assisted in my own understanding of the
underlying nature of CAS and set the foundation to help me figure out how to
work around NTD security problems. There are also many CAS resources at
MSDN that are very helpful.

For the customer that I build NTD apps for, their opinion was that the
benefits outweighed the technical difficulty of implementation. Seeing all
the articles and conference coverage of One-Touch in upcoming versions of
VS.NET, makes me believe that many more people feel that NTD is a viable
deployment model.

Joe

 

[Felix Wang]

Hi,

Thanks for posting. Here are some additional resources for you:

Security and Versioning Models in the Windows Forms Engine Help You Create
and Deploy Smart Clients
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/02/07/NetSmartClients/default.aspx

This is a really good article on non-touch deployment subject.

Deploying .NET Framework-Based Applications
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5B7C6E2D-D03F-4B19-
9025-6B87E6AE0DA6&displaylang=en

This is a comprehensive lifecycle guide for deploying .Net applications.
There are some sections for non-touch deployment as well.

I hope the information is useful to you.

Regards,

Felix Wang
Microsoft Online Partner Support
Get Secure! - www.microsoft.com/security
This posting is provided "as is" with no warranties and confers no rights.

 

[Tim Jarvis]

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

In addition to the good links that Joe and Felix gave you, MS have an
application block that implements one touch deployment in such a way as
to bypass some of the security restrictions, A little more complex, but
may be what you are after.

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnbda/
html/updater.asp>

Cheers Tim.

 

[wobbles]

<snip>

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the links.
I've seen some of them before but obviously a few I had missed!

This one looks particularly useful:
http://www.windowsforms.net/Default.aspx?tabindex=3&tabid=40#Deployment

The updater is also new to me, but interesting. I'll have to investigate.


Anyway, thanks for replying.
I also think that no-touch is a great selling point for .Net.
Many of the problems we used to have (during my previous job) was to do with
deployment and versioning, rather than with the application itself.

Thanks again. I really appreciate the help.
Wobbles

======= Some gripes =======
I think one strategy that perhaps Microsoft could adopt is a better naming scheme for
their technologies.
Searching for "C#", ".Net" or "no-touch deployment" is actually quite hard, because
people call them different things - "csharp", "dotnet", "NTD" or "smart client", etc.

Many search forms also don't like the "#" so a "C#" becomes a search for "C".

:-(