I have a rather convoluted project. The distributable will come in eight different flavors, each with its main program, libraries, datafiles, doco, etc.
Each flavor will also have one or more standalone executables that can be called as tools from within the main program.
To complicate matters I'm using VSS 2005 to track everyting and I'm trying to use links both within the IDE and VSS to minimize the possibility of error and to let the IDE do all the work at build time. This works great with the datafiles, doco, etc. (Though I wish that it were possible to use the content / copy mechanism to copy to directories parallel or even below bin rather than within bin. It's nice to have the readme file in the root. Anyone at MS listening BTW if I've overlooked something that would allow this please let me know.)
QUESTION: Without building a setup / deployment project, i.e. with just relying on the IDE's main build / package mechanism, how do I specify that the tools need to be included in the distribution
I tried linking them and the build barfed. I used add existing item to link to the tool's exe and config file if any, I put the link in a tools folder with the hope that it would work just like the data and doco and artwork which is working splendly thankyou. But the build doesn't allow that.
So what should I do A separate setup project is out of the question!!! I've promised installationless operation as a key selling point. And that of course is no problem with framework. The program needs to play from a cd-rom without installation.