Assembly Deployment Tool
- 3 minutes to read
Note
Assembly Deployment Tool supports .NET Framework applications only.
The DevExpress Assembly Deployment Tool allows you to collect the required redistributable DevExpress (and custom) assemblies to deploy your application. The tool is provided as a VSIX Visual Studio extension (supported in Visual Studio Professional, Premium and Ultimate).
To access the Assembly Deployment Tool, choose Tools | DevExpress Assembly Deployment Tool in Visual Studio.
This invokes the DevExpress Assembly Deployment Tool dialog. In this dialog, specify the file path to which to deploy your project(s), select one or more projects from your current solution and click Analyze.
After that, you will see a list of DevExpress assemblies required for application distribution on the right side.
The assemblies list is organized as follows.
- Output files for the selected projects are at the top of the list: executable files (.exe) for WinForms and WPF projects or assembly files (.dll) for ASP.NET web applications.
- After the output files, there is a list of DevExpress assemblies directly referenced by the selected projects. These include additional required assemblies such as ASP.NET or WPF Themes, and/or the DevExpress Printing assembly that may not be directly referenced by the selected projects. Note that design-time assemblies (*.Design.dll) are not included in the list even if they are directly referenced, as they are not required for distribution, and it is strictly prohibited to deploy such assemblies according to the DevExpress EULA.
At the bottom of the list there are additional items for customizing the overall assembly list.
Add non-system referenced assemblies… This item adds non-system assemblies referenced by projects to the list. Note that this item is unavailable if there are no corresponding assemblies referenced by a project.
Add a custom assembly… This item allows you to add any custom assembly from the disk to the list for further distribution along with other DevExpress assemblies. Click it to be able to select a custom assembly. Note that you can add one assembly each time you click the “Add a custom assembly…” item.
If you add custom assemblies to the redistributable assembly list or exclude automatically detected DevExpress assemblies, your choice will be persistent for each solution as well as the specified destination deployment path. Thus, you do not have to reconfigure the list of required redistributable assemblies each time you collect them for deployment.
Note
The Assembly Deployment Tool does not collect Satellite Resource Assemblies used for localization. You should collect and deploy such libraries manually.
As an additional option, you can add or remove the redistributable assemblies from the list by choosing corresponding DevExpress products. The products are listed in the By Products tab for the specific DevExpress product version. A list of required assemblies will be added once you check a specific product. This feature is useful when your projects do not reference DevExpress assemblies explicitly. It may load them implicitly using Reflection, for example.
Once you have selected the required assemblies and specified the deployment folder, click the Deploy button.
The Tool will copy all selected assemblies into the specified destination folder. Note that if the destination folder does not exist, you will be prompted to create one. If the destination folder is not empty and contains any of the selected assemblies, you will be asked to rewrite the files in the destination folder.