Deploy Application with extra files

[tonyladuk]

Hello!

I've created a second project to my solution that handles deployment but its all a bit new to me so please bear with me!

I've got the gist of being able to add files as dependencies and add them to the setup program so that when it has been published, it copies the files to the working directory.

That works great, what I need to do though is not specify in design time a particular file that I need to install on the users machine. I want it to just pick it up in the setup process if its on the installation CD.
Let me put it this way:
The file that I want to link is one of say 50 and is potentially 3Mb. I dont want to link all 50 files to the project because the user has no need for them all, they will only want one. I know what this one file will be when i release it to them so i'm thinking that I just add it to the CD when it is burnt for them. Then it would be great if the setup process could look for any extra files (with a particular file extension) and add them to the working directory so they can be used on the users computer.

At the moment without knowing a better way, i can either add all 50 to the project and install them all on the users computer or just give the user instructions to add any other files manually to the working directory.

Obviously, neither of those options are very viable, and I wondered if anyone has encountered anything similar?

Thanks in advance

 

[cjelec]

You could put the files into a cab file and add that to your setup project, set the properties of the file's Build Action to Content, then add the code to extract the contents to a given folder.

Or just add the file to your setup project and set the destination of the files (the apps folder,mydocs...).

 

[tonyladuk]

That's not really what I had in mind, I've already mastered adding files to a project but there could be upto 50 different files, all potentially upto 3MB in size. Therefore, I dont want to add them to the project or a cab file as I dont want that amount of data to be installed on the users PC.

All i need to do is automatically create a folder on the destination PC. Then copy any extra files on the CD to this folder so that during CD burning, I can just add the relevant file.

 

[mansii]

I would add another executable project and run it automatically when the setup project finished setting up.

Add a user interface and let them choose if options are available, or just give default values to the selected additional files.

At least, that's what I did.

Regards.