XNA Game app without installer
A friend and I are planning to develop an XNA game. I am in charge of the software aspect, and it got me thinking - what is the easiest way for me to share app updates with him during development?
Will he be forced to reinstall the application every time I want to show him the changes?
Is there some kind of fix mechanism that I can use?
Perhaps you can even create a game that doesn't require installation - just click and play?
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Simple double click and play - no installer
If you plan on using Microsoft Visual C # with Xna
Open the project
Navigate to -Project -Properties
-Go to the Publish Section
-Select the Options button
-Under Deployment uncheck "Use ".deploy" file extension", check box
Now publish your project ...
In the publishing directory, you will see a folder called Application Files. This folder contains each published version of your program in a version-numbered folder, assuming you automatically increment the version count for each publication. There will be an ".exe" inside each folder. Double clicking on this button will launch your program with the installation required. :)
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If he can build the application himself from the source itself (that is, he has access to VS2010, he has XNA and knows how to build the project), you can share the code changes with him.
The best way to do this would be through some sort of source control mechanism (e.g. SVN, GIT, Mercurial). This way, it can simply update its copy of the code when you've made the addition that you want to test.
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If it is just testing the game / whitebox, you can use the install installer command in visual studio to export all of your game functions so everyone can reproduce them.
Then you can check this against some kind of source control repository as mentioned earlier to make the executable available online for it.
While this feature builds your project, it will need to install the XNA Redistributable, which is readily available on the web.
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