The Publish functionality in Visual C# Express worked a treat; everything is working nicely on all the different computers I’ve tested it on (thanks to Justin, Arron and Gavin). The final package compresses nicely into a RAR at about 500k, I’d put it up for download but I’m not sure if that would violate any rules. The project should be downloadable after it’s submitted anyway.

Using the publish functionality in the Visual C# Express was a breeze. The only problems I had stemmed from my idiocy where I had a hard coded database connection string. Of course I found that out after I had waited for the .NET 2.0 and SQL Server Express to install the 333 MHz Celeron test machine I was trying it on. :)

To publish your project go to the Project menu, and choose ProjectName Properties, where ProjectName is your project name. Click the Publish link on the left and then select where you want to publish the project to, I put it in a temp directory on my hard drive. Click the Options button and then enter the appropriate information about your project, name, language, etc. Once you’ve entered that information uncheck the Automatically increment revision with each publish option. That way when you mess up the first ten times it’s still at 1.0.

Then click the Publish Wizard button to go through a few more options and then your application should be published. The great thing about the Publish functionality is that it checks if the user has .NET 2.0 and SQL Express Server and if it doesn’t fetches and installs them for the user. The installer also adds the program to the Add/Remove programs list in Windows. This makes things so much simpler from my point of view.

The only problem (aside from my silly connection string issue) was the help file not being included in my published application. I fixed this by changing the properties of the help file in my project. I set Copy To Output Directory to Always and changed the Build Action to content. The next time I published the application the help file was included as expected. One other minor issue I had was the installer having problems installing over a previous version but that isn’t exactly rare.

I’d like to use the Auto Update functionality, it looks really simple to implement and for on going projects I imagine it would be hugely useful to developers. To check out the functionality click the Updates button just above the Options button on the Publish page.

Good luck to all contestants that end up submitting their project, I hope you’ve all enjoyed the competition as much as I have. It’s given me a nice timeline to work through and I feel a nice fuzzy feeling deep down inside that all work in the project has been completed by me, no inclusion of anyone else code or work. For now I’m going out to celebrate :)