Description:
What are the installation steps required for registering/using DevExpress WinForms products when deploying a WinForms application to a desktop?
Answer:
Here are all possible variants of our DLL deployment.
- There is no need to redistribute our XML files. They are only used at design time.
- You should redistribute those DLLs which are referenced by your application. By default, all our DLLs are located in the "<Program Files>\DevExpress XXXX.X\Components\Bin" folder ("<Program Files>\DevExpress XXXX.X\Components\Sources\DevExpress.DLL" for versions prior 11.2). You can use our Assembly Deployment Tool, which is shipped along with our components to get assemblies that are necessary for your application. You can find a standalone version of this tool for older versions of our controls in the following article: A tool for collecting the required DevExpress assemblies for further application deployment.
- When installing your application, you can place our DLLs in the same folder where your distributed EXE is located.
- Another approach is to register them in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) using the Gacutil tool.
Note: Distribution of our design DLLs which end with "Design.dll" is prohibited.
See Also:
How to distribute applications that use DevExpress .NET Windows Forms controls
How to deploy applications based on the ASPxGrid
Hi Max,
I want to create a click once application to make it easy for my users to keep updated. Users will be geographically spread so I need to ensure that everyone is on the same version.
I have a winforms licence and if I include them in the setup, the application is approx 75mb. Most of the users are based in Nigeria where connectivity is not great, so 75mb is just going to work every time I do an update to the app.
I would prefer to install all the DLL's upfront and not part of the setup file (like we do with dotnet framework).
Instead of using the Gacutil tool, is there another way for my to install the necessary dll's onto the users machine?
Regards,
Graham.
Hi Graham,
I suggest you take a look at our tool from the A tool for collecting the required DevExpress assemblies for further application deployment KB article that collects all required assemblies for deployment. You can collect them only once and deploy them to your customers so that they can add the assemblies to the application folder.
But, I would like to note that ClickOnce does not update files that were not changed. So, our assemblies should not be re-downloaded when you update your application. See the ClickOnce installer - how to install only changed files? thread for more details.
Thanks for the info, Gosha.
I've installed the tool and it works nicely by extracting the relevant dll's. I suppose my question is… because I'm using a click-once deployment strategy, the destination folder cannot be specified and I want to try and automated the installation as much as possible. So I was wondering how I could perform a once off installation of all the required dll's into the GAC without having to place them in the app directory or will that not work?
The alternative is that I just bite the bullet with the big first install and then when I deploy future versions of the app it'll only download the files that have changed. The only problem with that is that the dll's ship with every deployment done which will fill up my web file server.
Decisions… decisions…
Hi Graham,
As far as I understand, you have several applications where the same version of our assemblies is used and you wish to avoid deploying our assemblies in each application. If so, you can exclude our assemblies from published ones via ClickOnce and deploy them separately. You do not need our assemblies to be installed into the GAC. It's sufficient to place them in the application folder.
I am using VS 2022 and DevExpress version 21.2.3 running on a Windows 10 64 bit
In VS with an opened solution, when navigating to Tools\DevExpress Assembly Deployment Tool, the deployment dialog appears, but in the 'Select projects to deploy:' window is empty!? How do I get the solution to show up in this tool?
Hello David,
Thank you for contacting us. We are aware of this issue and are researching ways to resolve it here: DevExpress Assembly Deployment Tool - The "Analyze" button is disabled if the tool is started using VS 2022. I added that ticket to your Support Center Favorites List so that you do not miss any news.
Same issue. Deployment tool can't find projects. What are the suggested work arounds?
Hello Scott,
We have recently fixed this issue in the context of the above-mentioned ticket. We are preparing a hotfix. I added that ticket to you favorites so that you receive a notification once the hotfix is ready.
Aleks,
Thank you.
Are we talking hours or days? Need to know so I can work around this temporary setback.
Hello Scott,
Usually it takes up to a few business days to prepare a hotfix. The hotfix for this issue is ready and published. As another possible workaround consider deploying your application with the help of one of the previous versions of Visual Studio.