Dependencies and DLL in Visual Studio Installer

Question

I am using VS2010's Visual Studio Installer to deploy my application to an MSI.

I referenced numerous DLLs during development; some are 3rd parties, while some are system DLLs. Now during deployment, I do not know what to include or exclude. Visual Studio automatically included Detected Dependencies after I added the output .EXE but they are usually not sufficient to run the application. I often had to manually include the development's DLLs to the installed application folder. Otherwise, eventvwr would just provides a generic CLR20r3 error that only tells me missing DLLs but not indicating which one.

It became a habit (a very bad habit, IMO) to include ALL references in my deployment project as they are referenced in my development project, but I guess uninstallation of the application may possibly remove System DLLs that causes problems to other application.

So how would I know which DLLs to include manually in the deployment project, in addition to the Detected Dependencies?

Solution

All of your thirdy party dlls need to be distributed with your application.
You need to check the documentation of these libraries to get a precise answer.

As a rule of thumb, look at the References section of your projects.
Note down the libraries used there and then check with the documentation if additional libraries, not detected by VS, are needed. Sometime these libraries provides a 'Redistributable Package' that you can include in your setup project.

I prefer to do this work manually and always test in a empty virtual machine. It is very embarrassing to have a failed setup when your customers install the application.

To deinstall, you really have nothing to worry if you install everything in your application folder.

Comments

[GilesDMiddleton]

You are correct, but I've discovered that 'detected dependencies' can magically re-add things including excluded files! See connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/1900756