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VB.NET Application Deployment

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drrocket5292

Technical User
Sep 6, 2005
73
US
I'm not sure if this in the right forum but I couldnt find one that would be more fitting. I built a windows application in VB.NET and was hoping to get advice on deploying it. I work for a financial company that is constantly bringing in agents to work for us. When they join our company they have to transfer their book of business over to us and I wrote an application that allows them to easily enter their book of business and puts it into an Access database that can then be easily imported into our company's database.

Due to all sorts of SEC and federal laws though, we aren't allowed to house that database (the one with the agent's book of business) on any of our servers until after the agent has officially joined us, but we want him to use this program and enter in his book of business before hand so that on the first day he joins, we can import his data. Several people, such as his secretary or any of his other associates may also use this program to enter in his book of business, so I cant just install it on the agent's hard drive since other people will need to access the database from their computers. So what I would like to do is to have the Access database install itself onto a shared drive that the agent chooses when he first installs my program.

Can someone give me directions on how I could let an installer dynamically choose where to install the back end database? Thanks for the help.
 
How about storing the database path in an app.config file? You could put a custom action in the installer to prompt for the path. There's a decent custom action walkthrough here:

It's meant for making database modifications from an installer, but changing it to use an OpenFileDialog to pick the path and an XmlDocument to change the config file shouldn't be too hard.
 
Yes, you can do that (VS2k5 can at least). How I'm not totally sure about. One you would have to add a custom dialog in the User Interface and likely several Custom Actions. It is doable I've just never needed to do so. You could also get a more robust 3rd party installer than the one that comes with Visual Studio.

-I hate Microsoft!
-Forever and always forward.
 
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