Hello,

I have extensive experience with Access VBA, but I'm a fairly new VB coder. I have written a small (one Windows form) app in VB 2010 Express that I want to give away. It runs fine on the development machine. I gave the exe file to a friend, but it would not open when double clicked. I got the exe file from the Bin, Release folder on the development machine.

My first thought was that the friend's machine did not have the requisite .NET runtime, etc. But now I'm wondering if something else could be the cause.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Could you please list all the files names here in the Release Folder for me to look at so I can see if there are any dll's that the exe is depending on.

There are two other files. Their filename extensions are pdb and xml.

There is also a folder named app.publish.

There probably isn't any files in that folder but if there is please tell me the names.

You can't publish a project from the express version.

Try and give your friend all the files in the release folder just send them the folder in a zip file and see if when they double click on the .exe file it runs

Glen,

I have made a bit of progress and hit another wall.

By the way, I am following instructions in James Foxall's "Sams Teach Yourself Visual Basic 2010 in 24 hours." In the beginning of the book, he says he used Express for everything in the book.

Hour (chapter) 23 is titled, Deploying Applications. It steps through using ClickOnce technology to create a ClickOnce application. After he creates it with his simple demo app, he then runs the setup.exe to install the application. I am able to create the ClickOnce without a problem. When I take it to another machine to install it, the install runs smoothly then presents this long message, "Unable to install or run the application. The application requires that assembly Microsoft.VisualBasic.PowerPacks.Vs Version 10.0.0.0 be installed in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) first. Please contact your system administrator."

Any suggestions?

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To answer your question about the files in the Release folder, here's the whole thing...



In all cases, MyApp, is the name of my application, which I an not permitted to show here.

Thanks again.

Did you create a new Deploy- Install project first?

Mary Lee has a blog describing how to do it. You must include the power packs for Visual Studio 10 when you create the install package.

I will check out Mary Lee's info.

No on the Deploy - Install project. I'm not familiar with it or its purpose. Don't see these words on any menu.

I just took a quick look at Mary Lee's info. She indicates Deploy - Install is not available in the Express edition, which I am using. She goes on to say that Express users can use the ClickOnce to achieve the same thing. Yikes! That's what I tried and hit the roadblock mentioned in a previous post.

I will go back and review Mary's info carefully to see if I did something wrong.

Thanks for your help.

ClickOnce is the only option to deploy an express version of a VB.Net app is true but maybe reading THIS pages articles may help you.

If you can not get it to work using the ClickOnce option you may have to look at some free installer packages.

Another thing you could try is have your friend install VB.Net Visual studio 10 Express on their computer, which should allow them to install the necessary power packs.

How many people do you plan to distribute this to?

The plan is to make it available for free on a website as a loss leader for selling an Access application. With luck, thousands of folks will download and install it.

Then you will need a installer package.